An Evening With Nigella Lawson, during which the culinary star is interviewed onstage as well as takes audience questions, is coming to the Bay Area for two shows in November.
An Evening With Nigella Lawson, during which the culinary star is interviewed onstage as well as takes audience questions, is coming to the Bay Area for two shows in November.
Matt Holyoak
Culinary goddess and beloved cookbook author Nigella Lawson released her latest, Cook, Eat, Repeat, during the pandemic and is coming to North America in November for an extensive theater tour, An Evening with Nigella Lawson. She’s been away from the U.S. for a long stretch and is excited to return. “It’ll be fabulous!” she says. “It’s tiring to be on a plane a lot, but it really enlivens me to just go to the States and see what’s happening. Everyone is always so warm and the food is delicious, so it’s great. What else do you need?”
Even though her cookbook has “repeat” in the title, each city’s event will be quite different based on the conversations and questions from the various interviewers. The second half of the evening will be dedicated to audience questions, which is Lawson’s favorite part. “The audience who comes is largely responsible for what we talk about — there’s something kind of real and unplannable and kind of intimate in that way because it’s not a lecture, it’s a conversation,” she notes, adding, “Food people are just wonderful people, and I suspect often if they’re interested in me, they also like reading or like words as well, and like talking, or thinking and listening.”
Nigella Lawson’s latest cookbook intertwines recipes, including ideas for the holidays, with narrative essays about food.
She clarifies that Cook, Eat, Repeat was not just a “lockdown cookbook,” although the pandemic provided her the time to “think about food at length” and write essays and longer headnotes to accompany over 50 new recipes, so this New York Times bestseller offers quite a bit of food for thought. Something on Lawson’s mind is how you learn from the recipes you repeat, instead of bouncing around to new recipes all the time (which feels more commonplace these days). In our interview, she comments that although home cooks don’t have the daily repetition of tasks, like a cook in a restaurant kitchen who’s regularly chopping pounds of onions or peeling hundreds of potatoes, the more we repeat the way we do things, it “arms you to cook so many different things, and the less daunting it is because you realize these are really quite simple steps. Confidence is very important. But competence, its less-glamorous sister, is also important, and it makes you feel you can do something. And I think that has its own quiet satisfaction.”
The pandemic offered a unique confidence- (and competence-) building opportunity to many of us who were cooking for one, which Lawson believes “is a very good way to learn how to cook and to trust yourself and really work out what it is you like and don’t like and what processes suit you. We’re all slightly different temperamentally, and we have different-sized kitchens or maybe a bigger or smaller cupboard. We’ve eaten different foods in our lives, so you’ve got to work out what suits you as a person.
“What stops people feeling confident about cooking or trusting their competence or their palate is partly just the fear of being judged, and I think that’s very unfortunate. Once you’re stressing and your shoulders are rising a bit, you lose your ability to think, ‘Do I need more salt in that, or do I want a bit of lemon juice?’ You just lose your ability because you’re worried it’s not right. Whereas when you cook for yourself, you don’t worry in the same way. And therefore, of course, things do go right.”
Since we’re hopefully inviting people over more now and gearing up for holiday entertaining, Lawson, of course, has some sage advice: “When you cook for people, don’t ever think about what will impress them — just what’s going to give some pleasure. If the best thing about an evening with people around a table was the food, it’s not a great night. It’s the zigzagging of conversation around the table and the laughter, that feeling of being bonded together and sharing a meal.”
She also says if there’s something that didn’t come out the way you wanted, “you’re allowed to apologize for something once, but you can’t carry on saying it.” So, no self-flagellation at the table — just pleasure. And to that end, she recommends her brown butter colcannon — Irish mashed potatoes with cabbage or kale — for your holiday meals. 
Marcia Gagliardi is a San Francisco–based freelance writer and restaurant columnist, well-known for her groundbreaking, 16-year-old newsletter: subscribe at tablehopper.com. Instagram: @tablehopper
