Nigella Lawson on cracking America, the wiggle dress, and horsemeat

The American campaign

It's past 8 p.m. on Valentine's Day 2013, and a queue is still snaking around a kitchen store in a suburban Los Angeles mall. Inside, Nigella Lawson — in a shocking-pink "Diva" wiggle dress — is signing copies of her new book, Nigellissima: Instant Italian Inspiration, swapping recipes with fans, and radiating charm despite a 5 a.m. start, a hangover, and three hours in LA traffic.

The 53-year-old was in the middle of a grueling ten-day American book tour, riding the wave of her new U.S. cookery show, The Taste. Britain's most famous food writer was becoming America's too.

The dress is a uniform

Lawson's figure is as famous as her food, and she was typically forthright about it. The wiggle dresses, she said, are "a uniform" — "they help me feel confident when I'm working. In private, I'm happiest in a dressing gown and FitFlops." She buys them mostly online, choosing what flatters and feels good: "It's funny when people pay so much attention to my appearance because, quite honestly, it's the thing I think least about."

The losses that shaped her

The candor turned serious on the subject of her family. Her first husband, journalist John Diamond, died of throat cancer at 47. Her mother, Vanessa Salmon — heiress to the Lyons catering fortune — died of liver cancer at 48. Her younger sister Thomasina died of breast cancer at 32. She has two children with Diamond: Cosima (known as Mimi), then 19, and Bruno, 16.

"I equate thinness with sickness," she said. "I saw both John and my sister get incredibly thin and fade away in a cruel way. It would be really weird to me to want to emulate that look." The premature deaths, she said, made her a risk-taker at work: "Failure at work doesn't worry me. It's not life-or-death."

Her children, she revealed, call her "Medical Mama" for her readiness with pills and potions — part of her determination to shield them from fame's downside. Her daughter had a job and had asked Lawson to cut off her allowance: "I think it would ruin their lives to give them a lot of money while I'm alive."

On Saatchi, smoking, and the burkini

Her husband of ten years, art collector Charles Saatchi — whose Chelsea home held works by Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, and Jeff Koons — had famously lost three stone on a diet of nine eggs a day. Asked about his smoking, given she'd lost a husband to a smoking-related cancer, her smile froze: "I don't smoke but I enjoy passive smoking. Charles does enjoy it a lot. He's a grown man. I can't tell him what to do."

On the infamous burkini photograph from an Australian beach: she rolled her eyes. She'd worn the full-coverage swimsuit for years because "I don't like the sun on my body" — it only became a story when an Australian journalist photographed her surreptitiously.

The horsemeat verdict

Asked about the horsemeat scandal then engulfing Britain, Lawson turned serious: "People need to change their attitude towards meat. We've become used to the notion that expensive meat like beef should be eaten regularly and should be cheap. But it can't be. We should eat less but better quality." She'd eaten horsemeat herself — her Francophile parents ordered it in French restaurants when she was a child because it was cheaper than beef. "It tastes like a sweet version of beef."

Cooking as therapy

Boarding school at 11, she said, taught her to appreciate her mother's cooking — her mother's "Praised Chicken" (chicken and vegetables in a big pot) remained her favorite recipe. She learned to cook properly at Oxford, making vats of onion soup from market bags of onions "because I had to make cheap food taste good." Her cooking, she insisted, isn't "challenging" — it's therapy: "I eat proper food. I don't graze. I like meals."

And the "domestic goddess" label? "That was said in irony. I'm no goddess and that was the whole point."

Archive summary, February 2013, of the Daily Mail's original interview with Nigella Lawson. (The Mail's original URL no longer resolves.)