 It is my absolute pleasure to introduce our participant and host for the evening, food writer, historian and school food campaigner. Three times winner of the Fortnum yn Mason Food Writer of the Year award, author of six much-loved books, including most recently The Way We Eat Now. Here to introduce the panel, please welcome Bea Wilson. Thank you. It is wonderful to be here for you for coming. I have way, way, way too many cookbooks at home, so it has to be a really special cookbook to be one that I don't just cook from once but return to over and over again. And this one has been my constant companion for 20 years, but this one, which only arrived, your publisher only sent it to me last week, already it's besplattered, besmeared, loved, beloved. I know that it's going to be in my kitchen forever. Nigella Lawson is your sort of 11 cookbooks. She started off as a journalist. Well, before that, Red Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford, Italian and... Well, do you want me to bore you really? So you start with Medieval Latin, go into Provençal and then went into Italian and German. Became the Deputy Literary Editor of the Sunday Times at the age of 26, was the columnist for numerous magazines and newspapers. You wrote about restaurants for the spectator. You wrote about politics for the observer or op-ed features, opinion. And I remember you from then. I remember seeing you. You were on a great book show on TV with David Rolovich for a while, weren't you? So there was this sense of, well, what will Nigella's first book be? And I think a lot of people might have predicted it would have been maybe a novel or maybe some piece of literary criticism, instead of which it was this book which has celebrated its 20-year birthday, How to Eat, which I feel really changed the way that people wrote and maybe thought about food in this country for the better in so many ways. And backstage, Nigella has just been describing this fantastic book, Midnight Chicken, by Ella Rysbridge, as the offspring of this book. And actually it's funny because I was always reading it and it's the best possible, there's no way in which you could describe Ella's voice as imitating anyone else. You have a voice which from the first page is completely your own. It gets under your skin. It makes, I warn you this book, it makes you cry from quite early on, but then it makes you happy again. The subtitle is Midnight Chicken and Other Recipes Worse Living For. And it really has just a wonderful spirit to it, the recipes I've already started cooking from it. There's an amazing pea soup with miso and lime, which I never would have thought of. I add miso to lots of things but I never thought of adding it to a pea soup before. There's a chocolate chip cookie recipe. I've read so many and cooked so many chocolate chip cookie recipes that say they really are the best, the ultimate, the list for that. But your Paris cookies, they were so easy. They were, yes, so easy because you melt the butter and you just stir it up. And judging from how quickly they were gone, eaten by my children I think, no one was arguing with the best. And also this one, we were talking about how these two books, there's a certain affinity. None of us know how to pronounce this. It's not quite Chow Zagar, which is a kind of Vietnamese lemongrass rice porridge. This sounds terrible in English, which is why it isn't the title of this recipe. But it's one of the most comforting, delicious variations on chicken soup slash congee. Sorry, I'm not properly introducing you, I'm getting ahead of myself. Ella Rysbridger is also, as Nigella was 20 years ago, a columnist. You've written on many subjects, you wrote a poetry column for the pool. I did. This is your first book, but over the course of the next year I think you've got two other books coming out, one of which is a poetry anthology, which you're the editor of called Set Me On Fire, which your agent described me just now as the flavothosaurus of poetry, or the flavothosaurus of feelings. A flavothosaurus of feelings is how we sort of sold it. The flavothosaurus, if it was about poetry and about feelings, instead of about food, it's quite a lot about food in there, obviously. I'm always thinking about food. You're also writing a children's book, but we're not allowed to say very much about that. That is completely correct. I'm not completely certain how much I'm supposed to say about it, but that's a thing that I'm doing. You're cooking a lot, and I'm sure you'll write about food in one way or another. Oh yeah, that's the plan. For both of you, cookery writing is something that you chose, but there were many, many other forms of writing, forms of thinking, different genres, different literary ways at your disposal, and yet somehow you chose the recipe. I wanted to begin somehow by thinking about the title of this. We're meant to be talking about recipe and voice. It strikes me a lot of different things get said about this. There was some kind of Twitter row a few months ago, and I tried to look it up, and then I couldn't even find traces of it. Someone who said, please don't give me all the intro, just give me the recipe. Don't bore me with the preamble. So this happens every so often. It's very cyclical, isn't it? It's about once every six months. Somebody will pop up and say, I mean, I found some previous version of it, which was headlined, why don't food bloggers shut up and get to the recipe? And it strikes me that when people say this, it's not just extremely discertious and rude and impolite and doesn't pay attention to the fact that food bloggers are people who are pouring their heart and soul into words for other people's pleasure, for no money, and no one has to read a food blog if they don't want to. It's quite easy to scroll to the bottom as well. Yes, but it's missing the point. It strikes me that it's missing the point about what a recipe is. Yes, I think that, well, just generally, there's a lot of disinclination. There is a disinclination to see food in context, and food has a context, and it has a social context, it has a political context, it has a personal or emotional context. And look, the point is, all these are very important, but you do need to be engaged by the voice of the writer. And if you're not, I mean, you don't really want confessional, I think. That's a different thing. You don't want confessional. So I think there is... Although food memoir can be a great genre, and it's a writer, and it's not the same as a writer. But I don't think it's... I wouldn't call it confessional in the sense that I think it's about placing a food memoir, it's about placing a food in the background of the writer, and that's very important. And I think that when you're writing, that you want to know how this recipe came to be, and it can be a chaotic coming into being, and it can be that's where you opened a cupboard and that was there, or it can be something that you've thought about for a long time. But I think you need a background. And for me, I understand why people don't like it on the internet, because for me that's about the book, and it's about the engagement you have with a writer and a particular voice. Whereas actually, if you're looking up a recipe on the internet, you probably do just want the formula. Whereas a recipe generally, if it's reduced to the formula, seems to me to be very lacking. But it is so easy to scroll down. It is so easy to scroll past four paragraphs of someone's feelings if that's what you want to do. And I feel like I really understand the... I am looking for a recipe to do this thing because I have these things in my cupboard. I think that's quite a valid thing. It's a valid response and it's a valid way of cooking to be like, how can I feed the people in my house with what I have in my house? But as a person who is frequently tagged as confessional and I think this is always going to be the way if you write a really big book about your feelings, people are going to say confessional. Yes, I don't think you are actually. But you very much give us the context. There's a pasta which I just had for my lunch day called something like uplifting chilli and lemon pasta. But you said you were going to call it flatly suicidal pasta. I was. But then you realised it wasn't the pasta that was feeling suicidal. I mean, I still like it as a title. I think it really sums up. Like you can do this even if you're there. But... When in Rome, barata salad. Not enough, I love that. I wanted to read some of that actually because I think it's... We may come to it. I don't want to... I feel like we're too near in the beginning. I don't want to stumble over that. But I think that the difference is when you say you can scroll past it. But nevertheless, I think food and cooking is about so many other things. Why don't you read... Which was the one you were talking about? I wanted to say because I wanted to say that people who write with a voice are often described as being conversational. And I think that actually it's literary. But it's very cleverly, seems like it's conversational. And I was... As you know, I know this book well and I've written about it. But I wanted to read it again this weekend. And I was thinking about this because I was thinking just generally about voice and how that's thought to be the way it hooks people in. But actually, I'm going to read a bit of Ella's book, which is... So she's talking about some stranger on the internet saying, you seem like you need a bit of help. Come and stay with me in Rome. I've got a spare bedroom. So I'm going to talk about the apartment. Her apartment was perched high on a hill, one I later worked out of the seven hills, on a cobbled street in Trastevery, a little corner mostly ignored by tourists, populated by butchers and bakers and sprawling markets, plump with greens and plums and tomatoes of all shapes and sizes and colours. I'd never seen so many colours of tomato before, striped, subtle, gaudi, scarlet, green and gold. I was so entranced by the tomato stand and by the butcher's shop and by the cheese shops that I forgot really to look at Rome at all. My Rome was all food. You can keep your coliseums and it leave me the markets in the cheese man's grandmother with whom I struck up a brief, wordless, but devoted friendship. Now, people will describe that as conversational. It actually isn't. It's a beautifully constructed piece of prose and I think that that's very important because as a reader, I have some, for me, I maybe, I experience writing. When I read, I experience it as a form of taste and I like to, and I have to like the taste of a sentence and I think that's very important and I think we all feel like that in a way. We may not absolutely describe it in that way and it isn't always, it's not a voice, as you say, it doesn't have to be a voice that you speak in or you, but it has to be some, it's about a voice, like all literature, I suppose, that makes you look at things you look at normally differently or reflect on the way you perceive the world and with taste, that's very interesting when it becomes about a recipe and about taste because you have to push and be emphatically personal because there's no way, there's an objective sense. You don't know when you're doing a recipe who's going to like, you know, just as be loved the Miso with peas. You just, you cannot know that everyone will. You have to talk about why it works, why you think it works, what made you put those ingredients together and I think that's what really makes a recipe have some meaning other than being a formula. I was going to, you write about exactly that in At My Table. Can I read very quickly? You say, you're talking about portion size and you say, I mean, this is the funny thing, here we're going from talking about flatly suicidal pasta or tomatoes in Rome to portion size which sounds like a very sort of formulae dry thing but actually it isn't because it's talking about what kind of human beings are you addressing with your voice and you say, my portions are generous that I freely admit. I am never knowingly undercated but the problem I have settling on a serving size to give for each recipe is more than just a personal neurosis. There simply cannot be any precise or absolute formula to rely on when deciding. How old are the eaters? How large are their appetites? What else are they eating at the same meal? How big was the meal they ate earlier in the day? How large the plates are they're eating of will make a difference to the portion sizes too and already you're just asking these questions which is each of those thoughts is putting us in a different place. I had people say about recipes in my book. The portion sizes were very small and the portion sizes were far too big and I think, you know, I wasn't going to put portion sizes in at all. I was really reluctant to put any kind of portion sizes in midnight chicken because I don't know how much people eat. It's a part of the writing of food books that I hate the most. I cannot tell you how often I agonise about the portion sizes. I just don't know. I find it so difficult. I'm so terrified ever of someone not having enough to eat. And then I feel, but then I also don't want people to have, I mean, I like leftovers, but there's certain things that you can't heat up again. So you don't want people to waste their money and it just is agonising. It feels like a real responsibility. It is. It's one that really, I still, I'm not sure. Sometimes I go here and I think that was wrong. There's too many. That's for too many people. Don't you think, Ella, that's why, in a way, I think all food writing is. So we've been wrongly led to believe that a recipe is something which is a precise entity. But you know, the weather that day will make a difference to how long something takes to cook. The, where I keep my roasting tins annoyingly are kept on an outside wall. So they're always quite cold. If I don't remember to take them out of the drawer in time, then it will take longer to cook because they're so cold when they go in the oven. The material that the pan is made out of, all these things make such a difference. So if you write a recipe in a way that's just bullet point, bullet point, bullet point, actually it looks a lot simpler, but you're making life very much harder because you're making it look like these things take a certain amount of time and that is a matter of fact and it isn't a matter of fact. And also everyone's going to be buying maybe a slightly different cut. Or so all these things, so you have, in a way, you have to, I suppose, you have to give an approximate sense. You have to evoke rather than prescribe, prescribe something, I think. This was exactly the question I wanted to ask both of you because it strikes me that in both of your books, you mind about the portion size. I mean, it's not just some kind of free-for-all, the messiness of life. There is a sense of order to a recipe, isn't there? That there isn't necessarily, I can't even remember who it was. Somebody once said, didn't they, that sort of non-fiction can be all made up, but fiction has to be true. But a recipe, where does it stand? I mean, it's an order. It's a command. It's a way of taking the chaos of the universe and trying to put an order. In this book, again, you say, a recipe is a way of finding order in the mess of life. I love that. And Ella, in your book, you say, cooking is a framework of joy on which you could hang your day. I love that. I feel that so many times. I feel it's actually kind of, it's order out of chaos. But at the same time, you're both celebrating this sense of messiness in Ella's recipes. You're often kind of telling us, I love the way you're kind of exposing the truths behind these assumptions that, again, in the Piennese soup recipe, you ask us to squeeze and maybe it's got two limes. You sort of say, limes are tricky. You might not get much juice out of that particular lime. And often people just lie about lime, so they assume that a lime is a lime is a lime. It isn't. I think in a funny way, but a good book has to have a literary voice, but at the same time, you need to feel someone's raw knuckles in the kitchen cooking. And you need to know that every recipe has been cooked in you and when things are going to spill or in some sense. And I think that's in a way it's such a balance between the practical and the imaginary. Because in a sense, although I think food writing owes quite a lot to memoir, it is, in a way, it's a fiction of a sort because yes, you're described in some sense, you're describing meals that have already happened because we're describing things we've cooked in our lives and we're talking about them. But in terms of for the reader, and sometimes when you talk about food, it has to, you have somehow, it doesn't exist in a sense for the reader until the reader's cooked it. You know, I don't mean it hovers in that strange area that I don't know whether it's both happened, but it hasn't yet happened. It's interesting to me. So my grandfather read the whole of my book. I really didn't expect him to. He really likes the cricket. He really likes the cricket and being in his greenhouse. And he doesn't really do a lot of big reading of cookbooks. And he said he's never read one before. But he read all my book and I was very pleased. And he said to me, well, it's interesting because there's things that you say happened and I think they happened on two or three occasions. And it's like you've put all the things that happened together to make something that didn't happen, but it's the same as if it happened. And I thought that was a really, no one had quite stressed it out to me like that. And I think it's because he doesn't read a great deal that he read really big books about politics. He really just cares a lot about the history of the Labour Party. But it was interesting to me the way he was like, yes, it's kind of like fiction except that it's true. It happened because obviously when you're condensing a whole life for me, as I guess this is kind of particularly close to Memoir this book, and some people have said it's a food memoir, which I do dispute because there are a lot of recipes in there and I test them for ages. And I really feel like I've earned cookbook, you know? But obviously when I'm kind of describing the background of a recipe, I'm all when, if I say describing an evening when we ate this recipe, actually it's 10 evenings. It's lots of times that we ate it and lots of memories kind of rolled into one, which means that I've already got this kind of, not quite fictional, but also not kind of chronologically and exactly true framework around these recipes that actually have to be put as exact as I can make them. Cos I was in the first draft of this cookbook, quite vague about a lot of things, lots of, oh, put a bit of wine in it. I know you're not allowed to be like that anymore. In the old days. But my editor made a really valid point, which is that that's not very helpful to people who don't know. So my best friend who didn't really cook, I gave her the first draft of this cookbook and she was very pleased, it was very nice, it was a very nice time talking about how clever I was. And then she went out to cook something, she rang and she said, how much is a wine glass? How big is a wine glass of what? How when you say put a glass of wine in, what's a wine glass of wine? Which one? And it was really interesting to me to think about the things we take from that. Actually, it's something that we were reading when I was reading the way we now, where you've got that lovely diagram of all the different sizes of wine glass over the last 200 years. And they've gone up from 70 mils in the 17th century to 450 mils. In modern Britain. So it does matter. It does, but the thing is, the difficulty is, this is one of the things, the other, so portion size is very hard. But I find measurements hard, not because I don't know exactly what I'm doing, because I think that when you write a recipe, you want in a way to, a recipe is a record of how you cook something and you cook it again and again, and it might change a bit, but basically that's what you've done. However, the weight's measures don't necessarily matter. So that I try and, very much when I write a recipe, or when I try and explain that to some sense, that often you're doing a stew, you open your vegetable drawer, if you've got two leeks and three carrots, you'll do that. But you could easily have done it that way round. And a glass of wine, and when I did How to Eat, I kept, because these are recipes I cook forever. A bit like, in a sense, although I was older than you, the new writing old book, but they're recipes I've done forever and those are the hardest ones to do measurements of. And I was forever forgetting it. And I think it doesn't absolutely matter, but you need to write it from the point of view of how does it matter. I mean, you need to get a sense that this is a range or a realm. But once you get too precise, I think it takes a bit slightly the joy out of the writing of the recipe, but I think for reading, because it makes people more dependent. And I feel very guilty because in How to Eat, I said that I feel I've done my job. If I made myself redundant and then out of selfishness, I went on to write another ten books. But the thing is, and it's very interesting that in that time you're going to want much more precision. And I think it doesn't give people freedom. It doesn't make people feel relaxed. It makes them feel less able to make their own mind up. And I think that's, you know, if you read Elizabeth David or Jane Griggson, Jane Griggson, I think, you know, if we're talking about voices actually in writing, for me, Jane Griggson's voice is one I adore. You get such a sense of her background, her whoresness and her litteriness. She's so knowledgeable and she's so well read. There's a warmth which there isn't with Elizabeth David. But not that I think people happily want, but I also feel that Jane Griggson loves food in a way that Elizabeth David doesn't. I think... I wanted to ask you about this. It's like appetite, the extent to which the voice that you are both exhibiting on the page is about provoking appetite. My feeling is, I have these endless conversations with people. They look at my house, which is full of way, way, way too many cookbooks. And talk about, well, which are the good ones? Which are the ones you go back to? And in Ella's book, you've just put in a recipe for pancakes, which you admit is just a recipe for pancakes which you could look up somewhere else. But you want it in your book because it's your book and pancakes are important to you. And I'm endlessly using Nigella as an example actually of someone where there are many recipes in How To Eat which maybe I could have gone to Jane Griggson to get or somebody else, but I want your version because I want your voice in my head as I'm cooking it. And that's going to make my appetite feel a particular way. But I also think it's a bit like reading film criticism. You have to have a sense of the film critic's likes and dislikes and you know where you stand in relation to them. And I think when you read a food book, you do, you know, I can, reading your book, I feel I can get a sense of what sort of food you like and where I stand in relation to that. And I think that's very important. You have to be very honest about your like, as I said, there's no objective standard. And Nigel Slater can't stand eggs, which is, and yet he, one of our greatest living food writers and he can't stand eggs, which is one of the greatest foods in the world. But he's allowed that. He's allowed to have that football because he's Nigel Slater, so it's fine. Everyone's allowed there for me. Everyone's allowed there for me. Exactly. None of us is a true omnivore. But you're right. Maybe it's a sort of faking of appetite, which we can somehow pick up on. Yes, I think you can tell. Whereas in both of your books, I mean, yours, you seem really hungry for the things that you're putting in a good way. I think you have to have that. I mean, were there recipes that you didn't include where you thought, I don't love that soup as much as the one I've put in? Yes. So we start, when I pitched this, so I saw this book on proposal which for people who don't sell books or write books is where you write a bit of it and you explain what you're going to do and why it's going to be good before you've done it. It's not that fun. It feels very stressful at the time. But... Not as stressful as writing now. No, it's writing's horrible. I mean, it's better than everything else, but it is still horrible. But so I made this list of about 100 recipes. I think my editor is here, she will know. About half of which are in the book and half of which in making I decided I didn't love or just didn't feel like going or that I felt like I would never go back to. There are recipes in this book that I just cannot cook now because of the oat cakes, which are the first proper recipe in the book. I've said this before, so I don't mind saying it now. They took me so long to get right. I was terrified even after publication. Absolutely terrified that someone's going to say this recipe doesn't work. I was going to say, it did work. I got it to work. Because it's basically... So in Staffordshire, I don't know if anyone's from Staffordshire, but the oat cakes are like a flat OT pancake. They're not like the little hard Scottish ones. They're delicious. You put them with cheese or cheese and bacon or marmite. They're very good. But you buy them from a shop. Traditionally you buy them from an oat cake shop, which is like a hole in the wall and they come already made. Or you get them from povies. There are many others, but they're the best. They come in a packet. They come pre-made. They're not a thing you really make at home. So I was trying to recreate this thing. And it took me so long to get right. I made it. I don't even know how many times. Just so many disasters. A kitchen covered in yeast, kitchen covered in oats. Just things foaming inexplicably. But I don't even know why. But I need about five years off making my own oat cakes. So there are recipes, but even then, I'm so pleased there are recipes there. I'm so pleased it works. Lots of people are making them. And they do work. People have sent me pictures. I'm so relieved. And that is one of the ways in which a recipe is unlike any other literary form, that somehow it has this life out in the world. I mean, do you feel happy when a recipe lives? I do, but I feel that it's, again, this odd thing I was sharing, so that when my children were little, I made them these biscuits on their birthdays. I don't know if I brought them when they were one, to be honest. But when they were two, I did a cookie cutter with a two. And they went on. I stopped after nine. I didn't do double figures. I did 21. I did 21, but otherwise, I didn't. And I love it when people say they do that, those cookies, for their children. It becomes part of their family life. My children's birthdays were completely Nigella. I mean, it's weird. It's as if you were there at each of their birthdays, which it feels quite creepy in a way. I'm stalking you or something. But it's something that is a lot of pleasure. It's become internalised, and it's ritualised, and it's joyous that moment. It is. Exactly. We started making those biscuits, and then we had them at Christmas, and then, yes. But I think it might be the same for any kind of writing. So I've done a lot of writing on different subjects. I wrote about beauty. I wrote about my late partner's cancer. I wrote about poetry. I've written about lots of different things, and I have from having talked to people who have written novels and other things. When they're successful, they become the property of the person who's read them, really. So I did an event a few weeks ago, where someone had come from Germany with a bound copy of all of the columns I wrote about lipstick and cancer. All of them. She had bound them. She was German. She had bound them into a book, and she was like, I just feel like you have described all my feelings. I didn't really know what to say, except that it was obvious that, well, they belong to you now. What's a good answer? It feels like when you write something that's really... That's the whole point, is the connection between what you wrote and then it belongs to someone else. Do you know the catalogue chronicles? I do. I feel extremely defensive about the catalogue chronicles. They are my books. I'm sorry for everyone else who thinks they've read them, but you don't understand them like I understand them. They're mine. She wrote them for me. In a way, that's what I love about. Recipe books is that it's a very tangible sense of, well, midnight chicken is my recipe. I invented it, and it doesn't belong to me at all. It's like someone sent me a message. It's a first meal that we have had as a family in four years, and I cried a lot. I always cry a lot, don't worry. What a gift to be able to cry a lot. No, it's not. I cry a lot. I cried on the tube on the way here. So don't set us off. The last person not crying left on the stage. No, I'm a bit really stony. No, it's awful. I don't know. I was going to... I'm going to ask Nigella this in that case, because Ella and I might start crying. I'm going to ask you to a mate. Well, I'm not going to ask you to a mate, but I'm going to say both of your books are written. I mean, your book is called Midnight Chicken and Other Recipes Worth Living For, and you begin with a suicide attempt and saying we're going to step in front of a bus, and then you don't, and you find food, and it takes on this meaning for you, in how to eat. You write about your sister dying, and there are certain recipes in here which are hers. Is there some sense in which I keep coming back to this thought that when people originally had recipe books, this idea of a receipt, it was a remedy, and you might have these books, they were called Books of Secrets, and some of the things were for food, some of them were for a sauce, and another one might be this is what you take to make the pain of childbirth slightly less, or this is a cure for baldness, or this is a cure for melancholy, and I sort of feel you're both offering us cure for melancholy. We're both looking for one. Yeah, I think that's certainly true, and I think there's a way in which there's a lot in the beginning of your book that sort of thing with everything being too bright and too loud, and I do think in a way in which food is a refuge in that even if you're someone as clumsy as I am, that you're not having a life that's just thoughts going around in your head, that endless sort of rumination, worrying, fretting, regret, dread, all those things that we have as human beings, and instead you are doing something like chopping an onion, it's so repetitive, you have to concentrate or you're going to cut your fingers, you're stirring something, and I think it's very important, and I think both of us cook in a way that doesn't require any particular skill, but you have to be present. You have to be there in the kitchen, and having to be present is a very good way of escaping that sort of clutch of all those thoughts, and I think that is an attempt to, if not defeat melancholy, then it does somehow escape the 15, 12 minutes it takes to cook something. Which is all the more precious in a screen-obsessed digital age. I was struck, Ella, in your recipes, so often the way in which recipes are commodified, especially in Sunday newspapers who are just trying to sell more copies is sort of faster, easier, quicker, and in so many of your recipes you're telling us, do the garlic in this particular way, sort of chopping and rocking, and this is going to take a while, and that's going to be really good because you're going to enjoy the process, just tell us to inhale, just sort of zest something, and just inhale that citrus, and that's part of why your book resonated so much with me, because I feel restored sometimes in the kitchen where I think, I can't cope with my day, I just can't cope. I think this is it, because part of the reason I started cooking was basically to, you know, it was basically to kind of be like, okay, you're alive, how are you going to do this then? Which... Okay, you're here, you're alive, you have this body, what are you going to do with it? And I think you want to be as present and as physically present as possible, which is why cooking is so great, obviously, because you end up with this finished product and you have to do it, you have to cook, everybody has to. Even if you live off beans on toast, you're still having to heat something up, put something in the toaster, so you're having to do it anyway. And I think taking it very slowly and looking at what you're doing, it's probably a reaction to that, everything was too much, everything is too bright, so what I'm going to do is just chop this piece of garlic very, very small and maybe when I have finished it, it will be better or I'll have a really, at the very least, I'm going to have a really finely minced cope of garlic. You know, that's something, it's not nothing. And yeah, I think that's what we're doing. I do think as well, though, that there is a way in which with cooking, especially if you're an urban person, it's one of the few connections you have with the natural world, as odd as it is, even if you're taking tomatoes that have come in it with a plastic wrapper. And I think it's that, Dustin, when you write about food, you're seeking a connection with people. In everything we do really, that's the thing about being human, you're seeking a connection with people, but when you cook, you're seeking a connection with the world. With your own senses? You say you're, in a funny way, there's a two-way thing going, so you're blocking out a lot of the noise of the world. Yet in the same, in the same sense, you are aware that the, you know, the lemon you've got has had, you know, that this has got the sun in it, it's got the earth in it, and all those things make a difference. You're somehow touching something that was growing once, even if you haven't got your hands in the soil. I feel that, I've been involved in setting up this new food education charity called Taste Dead, where I take produce into classrooms and I've met children who say I've never felt an onion before, and I love that line, because I thought, it's not that you've never chopped an onion or you've never smelt an onion, you've never tasted an onion, I've never held a papery onion in my hand, and it's as basic and grounding as that, isn't it? Very important. Very important, and so many of us are deprived of that, and it's therefore a recipe that brings you back. This is true of Ella's book, and it's much odder than it was of my book all that time ago, which is it hasn't got photographs, and I think that, you know, it's a wonderful thing, in a sense, because it's about... I mean, I like food photographs, I love doing shoots, that's another thing, I like doing the food photographs, I get a lot of pleasure from that, but nevertheless, I do think that it means you do concentrate on the voice a lot more. I wanted to ask a bit, part of the reason we wanted to do it was because I spend... I'm now less than I used to because I'm not on Twitter anymore, but I used to spend far too much of my life on social media and far too much time looking at very beautiful pictures of food, and I feel like it can be extremely... If you've not cooked a lot, it can feel like a lot to live up to, and there's kind of a scope for imagination in having these drawings and having this kind of sketchy feeling of things being oh, it's going to be kind of like this, which it was very interesting to me, so we did a shoot for 12 of the recipes for magazines and things like that, which was a lot of fun and very strange, and also very stressful because the book hadn't come out yet, and I was just terrified, they were going to discover a terrible typo in one of the recipes and it was going to be we printed all of these books, they're all wrong, but they're all right, and but it felt like a very different experience, tweeting out or putting out recipes into the world that came with these beautiful photographs attached, I felt like there was 100 pairs with my microphone. I felt like it immediately became much more aspirational, it immediately became something trickier for people to necessarily kind of feel was theirs, I think I always want people to feel I was a bit at the start of the book where I talked about, please deface this book, I mean I've made you both signed copies of your books which are thoroughly disgraceful, so stained in in case of yours be completely a scribble. And I always want people to like, I think that's the best thing is if someone would feel a kind of, as we were talking about as I was saying with the caslets, a kind of ownership, and for me, I love Booktruckers, I can't remember which of your books it is in Nigella, but there's a duck with pomegranate bits on and she used to look at that page. I know, I always say to Yotam, I was doing pomegranates before you even What is this? Yes, that's very long, but no, that's bite. No, it's bite, I think. I think so, that's 2001 I think. The third one maybe. Because both of you, following on from what Ella just said, both of your voices, part of why I love them so much. Nigella has this line in this book, strangely it can take enormous confidence to trust your own palette. And I feel that's what you're talking about as well and that's what you show on the page. There's this kind of warmth and openness and kindness, but that's almost too weaker word because in a sense you are allowing people and their own kitchens into your voice and you're allowing a possibility that their kitchens might be different from yours. And also I feel that you have to start from premise you're not apologising for the fact that you're not asking people to cook because actually I'm also very I like just talking about food and I like reading about food. I read a lot of food books when I'm not cooking. I just like reading them, but nevertheless there is something that you were saying about everything having to be fast that there is a way in which food is often written about as if it's something you want to get out of the way with as little trouble as possible. And to an extent I understand that, but then I always think then you don't need a recipe for the sort of food that's simple because you just put a chicken in the oven. You don't actually need to be doing anything or have a bowl of pasta. It's not actually that difficult, but I do think when you write about food you think about so many other things and you have to have room to discuss to kind of a light on some of those things and in a way that's what makes it an exchange. You say it's not that difficult. You taught my husband how to roast a chicken. Those very few words you have in how to eat when you describe the way that your mother roasted a chicken which is now the way you do it. Those words, that couple of paragraphs taught my husband how to cook. He didn't cook anything before. Then he learnt how to roast a chicken from that. Then he learnt how to make pizza from how to be a domestic goddess. I wanted to ask both of you leading on from that. Both voice is the subject today. Who are you talking to? Who are you writing to? Is it yourself? I think it's always very interesting because when I was writing this book I was very aware that the people who buy cookbooks tend to be people who can cook. Unless it's specifically marketed this is a cookbook that anyone can cook from. But also I was aware that I wanted to try and make a cookbook that had something to say to people who like me had spent a year googling rice how long cook. And kind of wanted to do different things and wanted something kind of solid and tangible that wasn't this. You're so lucky I started off pre-google. I only learnt to cook pretty much. When I have a recipe that I got from family I have said so because most of my learning to cook came from well I have to eat something and my culinary repertoire is really limited at the point where I started this book to I can boil pasta. I can put pesto on some boiled pasta and I can grate cheese. So I was just trying to so I guess who am I talking to? I'm talking to somebody a bit like me before I had this book. I think the person I'm talking to is somebody who is possibly a bit worried about cooking. And there are recipes in there I think that speak to people who aren't worried about cooking but I think the person I had in mind was somebody who'd be happier cooking with someone else in the kitchen with them. And I wanted to be able to be that somebody else for people who didn't have someone to be like oh no no don't worry about it. That's actually the intro of how to eat that says I think the same is that and I think the difficulty is once you've written a food book people either want you to be an expert or they think you're claiming that you're an expert and yet you know the thing is is that all of us who cook we're not experts and yet we're still we still cook and that's how the human race keeps alive. And you know not you don't need to have a tall hat and know how to spin sugar. But I think it's quite difficult so I think that in a way it is that person. It is the person that the person you are inside it that is a bit that's making your way in the kitchen and at the same time I think I don't know I've never quite understood because once you think of a reader you can't write so in that sense there isn't someone. I mean I think that I think a lot of my food writing is a way of continuing conversations that I had with my sister and so I would be talking about food and what we were cooking all the time but on the other hand I also have friends who I feel have frightened of cooking and who think cooking is something so much more complicated than this so I sort of just wanted to calm them and get them into the kitchen before they realised they were there. Yes exactly. It's one reason I wanted to put in so there are a couple of recipes in this book where I'm just like well here are some failures here are some things which I think is a Laurie Colwin thing I love Laurie Colwin. There's a bit in home cooking where she just talks about things that she's cooked that were horrible and I I loved that and I think there's a really long recipe for a pie in this book with one from Danny the Champion of the World and the whole preface to that is me trying to make deciding to make it I don't know why like half ten at night and things like this is the time this is the time to make a really elaborate pie I've never made before that requires pork jelly and a hot water pastry which you've never made before and I wanted to include that recipe it's in many ways an account of a very long fight I had with my late boyfriend about why are you making a pie in the night please please stop this there's pork fat everywhere and I wanted to include it because I wanted it to feel real and I wanted to be I wanted to be honest that cooking can be complicated and like cooking can be complicated and fun and that I have written a book and often I am cooking things that and the world doesn't end when a recipe goes wrong exactly so I've got this thing called this page which is so beautiful I can say that because my illustrator Elisa Cunningham and Anita Mangan who did the design basically concocted this page it's gorgeous called blue soup what to do when things go wrong it's a British Jones joke in case people have not seen British Jones in a while which I was really I really wanted to make sure we had well put it in the bin get a takeaway have some toast in there I wanted to make sure it said very clearly at the start of this book this is not a disaster so you know and you know I want to be very conscious that there are people for whom a dinner's ingredients is a disaster but they're probably not people buying a 22 pound cookbook and so if you've got a 22 pound cookbook and you're looking at it probably you can suck it up and have toast for dinner if you've burnt it all it's going to be fine it's just going to be fine I mean the same way but photographs and when I do photographs in a book I do if something goes wrong you know like in feast I've said I had to make the photo small but I said look as you can see that I have put too much turmeric in the soup and it doesn't get radioactive I don't do that there's lots of things and I don't read photographs I just have to say look I'm really sorry this is what not to do because things do go wrong and I think you have to sort of go with it but it's very difficult people mistake voice for I don't know for some sort of expertise that goes beyond even past an exam I mean people always ask on Twitter people say something like can I do this in a different way and I always say is there any one way to find out because you know if you haven't tried you can't say and I don't know I'm not a home economist and also the same in my books they get read by a home economist who does all the things they tell me off when I say leave this here for five days and they go you really can't all my notes don't reheat don't reheat more than once all my books and every now and then sometimes I say I'm obliged to tell you to put this in the fridge because I think it ruins the texture but I have to say that if you take the risk and you kill yourself that's not my fault I also had so many so many notes so many red underlinings shouldn't this go in the fridge for some time are you really leaving this on the side to call are you really doing that I'm not I'm here it is one of those hard things so I think this is what I do I like it like this you could do it and I sometimes you know readers have said to me I did it a different way and I've learnt from that because it is all about the exchange and you can't know cooking is an abstract you can't just imagine what it would be like cooked in a different way so this is I'm aware the audience are going to have masses of questions so I'm going to ask you I have hundreds more questions to you but I'm going to ask you one more which I was going to begin with I think in this book at my table you have a rest you begin with poached eggs oh my god but it's taken me I am you know very elderly now and I had a very long career before I even wrote about food books that was 20 years ago I've only recently learnt how to poach an egg I don't at all I know but you know you've got about another 30 years to go but I love the way so you begin by saying so Turkish eggs the kind of poached eggs with delicious yoghurt and special kind of pepper flakes which Aleppo but you probably could use chilli flakes yes you say that and you also in a very forgiving and kind way if you have your own technique for poaching eggs use it but here is my way of doing it which involves putting the eggs in a strainer although I don't every day so you say I admit I don't always follow my own instructions and somehow outrepair of voice and recipes and the extent to which it's a precise thing it's a messy thing or I wanted to ask you both what is it like when you cook from your own recipe ok so I'm teased at home because when I cook from my own recipes I say things like I know she says put this in but I'm not going to so what was I doing today I was retesting a recipe for a particular soup and I was because I was retesting it I had to do exactly the same as I did last time only with one thing different and I was I was making such a bust like I hate the measuring don't make me measure it you're arguing with yourself you're saying this person told me to do this it's making me do it and I just don't want to and you're disobeying yourself well I couldn't disobeying because I was testing but in the end I do I do mostly disobeying myself do you sometimes come back and say oh this person was brilliant how did they know they're in the way I did because I strain the egg because a French chef I know said to me it's when eggs go all that fluffy it's because they're not fresh so if you put them through a very fine tea strainer the white drippy bits go so you just have the bits that aren't there but to be honest when I make my breakfast in the morning I don't mind if there's a bit of a frothy bit so all that makes a difference I'm going to tell you quickly now even though is that you crack the egg into a cup and you put either some lemon juice or vinegar just onto the white you don't do it in the pan of water and if you're only doing one egg this is much easier what I do now which is I've slightly taken on from that which I had it low so I bring it to the boil I turn it off and I put the egg in and I just leave it four to five minutes depending on what size the egg is just by itself in the calm and it's ruined hotels for me because the only good thing about being in a hotel was having a poach and I got a toast and now I can do it at home so I don't know what to have for breakfast when I'm in a hotel and Ella do you cook from your own recipes? Do you go back and retrace to them? Sometimes, not often I mean it's only been out since January and I spent five years writing it so I'm a bit sick of most of it I make a lot of midnight chicken but I never use a recipe anymore and occasionally I go oh gosh I was supposed to do that alright okay I hate following recipes I'm really really bad at following recipes any recipes I sometimes make myself follow a recipe for baking because the potential for it to go wrong you can't fix baking it's in the oven it's there but I'm terrible at following recipes and my own I am more angry with than anybody else That's a great irony isn't it that people are not irony but generally people who write recipes tend to be very bad at following them I kind of I do love going back to recipes I've written sometimes I'm thinking oh it would be really nice to do and I think of a particular assortment of ingredients and sometimes I google it and as one of my old recipes I was like so you had the answer all along yes it's quite nice I'll do that again but in a sense so a recipe is an idea it's a starting point it's a suggestion I mean in baking I think you have to be precise and I enjoy that because so you feel like it's following the rules but I think in a way that you're slightly giving yourself up to that alchemy and I like that as well I'm getting better at baking but I am much to my surprise this year I've really, in the last six months I've really sort of got into it a bit because I now live with my flatmate who likes baked things whereas I really I'm not a big cake person but I think there's a big difference when you're baking for someone who's going to enjoy the thing you're baking whereas for myself I'm not really I'd always rather like that I think cakes are nicer to make than to eat I don't mean all cakes but you know that whole thing it's so wonderful that it's meditative I think it's meditative but I think I wrote about this when I wrote my baking book I came to baking very late but I do think human beings have a fantasy about transformation and I think baking plays into that a great deal because something the ingredients are so utterly transformed by the oven we've talked about the recipe the framework of joy it's a form of ordering the universe and our messy lives and it's all biography so reading a baking recipe and it's a happy ending I mean that's the thing I kept also thinking every recipe the story arc is a happy ending because at the end there's closure and somebody's going to read even in life I'm reading these recipe books thinking I'm going to cook every single thing in it and obviously that's a total fantasy but somehow in your mind you don't want to get through a whole thing and post it that's a wonderful feeling because there is hope and there is life and there is something to hang on to and I think it's very striking that in this world and in this Britain where so many people feel divided or a bit mad or upset or angry and somewhere or another cookbook sales are going up which many years ago people were saying the internet was going to kill off cookbooks and it turns out that maybe we're more in need of these remedies or antidotes than ever I'm going to I could go on but I don't want to deprive the audience of their chance to ask questions Will you just join me and first of all Thank you I can't quite remember I'm sure they explained to us how that if somebody going round with a mic Yes Oh it's one of the ones you throw It is No the cubes you can throw Golly gee that's put me off my stride So I have read all of your books Nigella word for word and I look forward to reading yours Ella very much indeed The one that I get out and my kids know it's not mom's not sort of happy because I'm doing it for reasons of joy and happiness when I open it is Christmas so I open that book the boys leave the room they know that means mom's you know and I feel like some of that music from your programs comes out of it and all the pages are stuck together so the vanilla spruced up vanilla cake I make that every year I open the book but because the page is stuck I have to go online to find the recipe so that's my joy it brings me true joy and it's lovely which book do you both have that you find you open it for reasons over and above the recipes I love Laurie Colwin's home cooking Oh who's going to say that That's that's but there are two books that I do write about in how to eat one is Laurie Colwin's home cooking and she's got her ones and another one is Stephanie Alexander's cooks companion I think it's called which is very different because it's much more of an encyclopedia but it's something I even though I might not always follow the recipes when I'm thinking of it like what shall I do with this and I can open it up and it'll give me so many ideas and I think sometimes you just need a starting point and in a way it's a bit like what you're looking for is not for someone to give you the instructions but someone to have a conversation about to see oh I'm having a conversation what shall I do with this and so I often look at that book and it gives me plenty of ideas but both of them follow on from that I think here's my microphone again to follow on from that Nikki Segnet's Flavothosaurus is another one where I find you can do that ginger and ginger in this really and I feel like that's a very joyful book for me and a new one lateral cooking as well and she writes very well and lots of stories as well is that? Yes certainly stories I mean I find the new one the format doesn't serve the writing enormously it's very heavy you know because it's very long pages you're trying to read it in bed you're onto the pillow I don't think I can it but she's got so many stories and she's got a lot of wit as well and she knows a lot it's a bit why she's talking about it starts off in this recipe and I was in this beautiful Greek island and my husband emerged from the sea clutching some khakis that he'd found an octopus had given him these khakis and he gave them to a family and the family weren't even surprised and then we went to this beautiful restaurant we had a book for months to go to and they just served one thing and it was disgusting so we went home and had beans on toast here is this recipe for beans on toast such a funny beautiful way of getting to this recipe and I guess it seems we're saying again things going wrong and things not being but it's a relationship of trust isn't it I find the people I go back to Mira Soda again and again because I always know that she's going to tell me exactly the telling detail about whether the onion should be translucent or browned or not browned Diana Henry also just because she has both voice in the space she really does but you know that she's not going to just do that annoying thing where she's put 100g of butter 100g of sugar in a kind of way like a robot has invented the recipe you know that Diana she will have cooked it and cooked it and it will taste the best most exotic delicious flavours and version of it she's very good on flavour she's incredible on flavour and I think that in a way that's a sort of an imaginative power and as you said you trust someone because you trust their palate that really is what a book could do and I'm looking forward to her new one I have to say chocolate olive oil cake in eat a peach so that I keep going back and reading the recipe I've only made it once I've actually made it twice now and I'm going to make it again probably this week it's very delicious how to eat a peach if anyone here doesn't have it so lovely and it's so much stories as well I think for me and I guess that's the Laurie Colwyn too is that the books I come back to and feast as well is one of yours that I come back to over and over and I think those are the stories the cookbooks that are little stories about other people's lives and the way other people cook and the way other people eat I think we have a question here so some of the questions coming in this event we're not just having yes we're not just having one person didn't so this event is being live streamed in maybe six different libraries around Britain I'm not quite sure how many so some questions are coming in from people who are watching there this is we've got a couple of questions at the moment one from Norwich from Cat it's from Nigella do you feel your voice has changed over the years and if so in what way and why well yes I mean I'm a lot older and I'm 20 years older and I think your voice does change I mean I think my essential voice hasn't changed but I sometimes disagree with certain things I said in earlier in earlier parts of my writing and I've because I write very much out of my life there are times when I thought something cooking I mean I think in my first book I said why would anyone make a mince pie I just thought like why would you before I really learned how to bake and I thought you could buy very nice mince pies I don't understand it but actually when I taught myself how to bake I thought actually I can see the point and then as I got further I perhaps refined my sense of what is worth cooking or not and I came to the conclusion that in a sense something can be very very complicated but if you get pleasure out of cooking it then it's worth it but if something is quite straightforward and it's a nightmare to cook then it's not worth it but I think just like you find you might taste something you hadn't tasted before and that interests you or me and I might at different times in my life I've written different sorts of recipes depending on where I am when I had small children having done the I couldn't believe a lot of how to eat straddles the having children a lot and a lot of the recipes started off at the ones I'd always cooked and then I realised that you start cooking a slightly different way and so forth so that the opinions change more than the voice I think is really but sometimes my voice when I did the audio book of how to eat recently sometimes I just thought God I hate you I'm so embarrassed that you said that and yet you know editing would be wrong because a book belongs to the time it's published is it Zady Smith who can't read white teeth and she says imagine if something you wrote when you were 21 was out there and people kept telling you how clever it was when I think about all the time just Zady Smith just being furious that everyone's reading this thing she wrote when she was very young we've got Suzanne from Hull this sounds like potentially your idea hell actually but if you could eat only one dish for the rest of your life what would it be well I'll let someone else answer because I've answered something I'm going to give that I just don't think I would I don't think I could I think I'll be so miserable you toast are you allowed to choose a whole category I think we're getting a bit away from voice I would say soup because that could be many many things at once very very very sound we move on yes more questions there's one here at the front what do you think has most influenced each of your voices so I know that might not be a very easy question to answer there might be lots of things but is there one thing in particular that has shaped your voice I think what shaped my voice partly is my mother even though a lot of my life has spent trying to be something very different that's in the nature of daughters isn't it but but in terms of my cooking voice that played a big part but I think also I've always read a lot and I think what makes what influences your writing style is all the books you've read and they're not necessarily food books really so I think because of the age I am I wasn't really taught at grammar or anything because I was at primary school in the 60s where you didn't learn anything like that but I read a lot so you get a sense of grammar and you learn what the rhythm of a sentence can be and I think that you mustn't copy but it teaches you what a sentence can do I think it's probably the same for me in that I didn't really read a lot of cookbooks said I spent a lot of time looking at a picture of beef with pomegranate, duck with pomegranates on it but I didn't really read a lot of cookbooks most of my reading about food being a person who has written a cookbook came as a huge surprise to me it was basically accidental and I really didn't think that that was going to be the thing that I wanted to write about most of my influences I think are the fiction I've read mostly it's fiction mostly so before I gave up before I gave up looking at my own reviews and reading nasty things people have said about me on the internet I got this Amazon review where someone said it's the best mean thing anyone's ever said about me which is that I wrote a dozen Edwardian children's authors who didn't know how to finish a sentence that is very good that's a very high class it was a real it went on it was not all that good I don't think about that a lot in the just like people say backhanded compliment there should be insult that misfires because they've paid you a deep compliment while they're too stupid to realise it the thing is because your book does make me think of childhood it does make me think of reading I don't know I had in some ways this childhood that doesn't seem to exist anymore although I guess it does because people didn't think it existed in the 1990s where we spent a lot of time outdoors and on bicycles and never really saying our parents my mother was like well I don't know what you did and then the jam rest of the year you talk about that don't you we're just outside all the time and it was a very Edwardian childhood in lots of ways and so I think probably Inesbit is a big influence and the way they eat in Inesbit as well and the way they eat in the Treasury because something would be good and generally things like that I love that scene where they're trying to wash the fruit because it's a Christmas pudding and you don't add soap when you're washing raisins but just the idea of washing raisins is so Edwardian in itself isn't it we don't need to wash and de-stone our raisins anymore that's a good answer more someone over here we might have to throw it now and I'm looking forward to seeing this right over there diagonal we have the Bishop's move I think there's going to be a quicker one that way around I was getting worried all of you have written as journalists and you've written cookbooks and what do you see as the difference between writing about food journalistically and writing books or do you think there's a difference at all well I suppose you're romping about in a bigger paddock in a book you know that the journalism is about understanding you have a particular length most journalists I don't know if you feel this but most journalists have a natural length which is a bit about what length of piece you wrote for longest but I know that my natural length is 1100 words for writing a piece of journalism that's almost everything I will write whereas of course when you do a book you haven't got a length so it's notional that you do but it's cookbooks one of those rare books where people feel you know they're pleased if it's longer it's true isn't it Diana Henry sent some thought about this on twitter when we were describing this event and voice and she was saying well a lot of my voice has just been formed by the editors I had and the constrictions of the newspaper I wrote for but I don't think that's absolutely true I think that's how you feel because you're smart at the constraints but you're channeling something within the paper and I think I'm 600 words and the person for whom I used to write 600 words every week for 12 years is sitting in the audience and I feel there she is at such long places now but I still feel so I did a weekly 600 words for Elfrida sitting over there and I now do a monthly 600 words and when the monthly 600 words for the Wall Street Journal comes around I think I can't do this it's like muscle memory you're right, whereas any other lengths I almost have to go back to thinking of it as chunks of 600 so I find when people say it's as much as it's only short I feel like that's not it's not making my life easier short is so hard short is really hard I think it's mark twain everyone has that I didn't have time to make it shorter and I can quite easily write something that's about two and a half thousand words long it will take me about a morning and it will be easy easy easy ask me to write something that's 600 words long and it will take me a month of me refusing to do it I'm just not a writer anymore my flatmates have a lot of me just being well I just guess I'm going to have to get a different job because I can't write, writing's impossible it's all impossible you have to leave almost everything out with 600 words it's so hard, so my friend it's mainly not writing it's mainly reading things like that's not going to go in the piece it's hard to, my friend says that the most difficult piece to write, so this is my best friend Caroline who has edited me for obviously I'm a journalist of the internet age for a now defunct website but I was once trying to write a piece for her about K-web editor of Puffin which was such a nice piece to write and I just couldn't do it and she said the problem is you've got 1500 words and there's too much trying to get through the door it's like you've got a big crowd of people trying to fit through and their hair in the microphone again big crowd of people trying to fit through one door in order of importance but that's why in writing a book you have more room and yes in a way you just leave more out and I don't know what I was reading I was reading someone talking about writing a novel saying that writing is an exercise in control disappointment and I think that's true because every time when you think you're writing a book you have such hopes for it and it's this imaginary book that has everything in it and then the book that comes that there is that you're really aware of what's not in it and it's somehow so I think that's... It never lives up to the imaginary, does it? I also think however many words I've now moved from doing 600 as my default to doing things like Guardian Longweed which is 5000 5000 seems like nothing no matter how many words you're given by the time you come to revise it and go back to it you're just struck by well this doesn't belong there but I have thoughts about this thing that doesn't belong there and so you have a dream of what a book could be but you're plagued for longer with a book because you know journalism is you know I want to go to the next question but can I just mention actually journalism isn't quite as ephemeral as it was in the olden days last time I interviewed Nigella I was just so staggered by this fact I could have noticed it at many points before because I think you wrote it in your preface does anyone know how many weeks it took Nigella to write this book hands up if you know how long six weeks no but it took me a long time it took me a long time but I just wanted to put that out there it has more than six chapters and it took her six weeks to write and it's a masterpiece how many weeks did it it's very difficult to say so I mean this is a very complicated question essentially it took me about five years from pitching it to finish I'm not so at that mine took me in many years of not writing it but it offered whatever reason I'm talking about when you actually start you don't write like that any more do you very large keyboard a lady in a cafe once stopped me when I was writing me about chicken she was just like I must just tell you that you type like you're playing a concierto and she just brought her hands up and dropped them down again over and over again to illustrate the point everyone had been looking at me in this camera slamming my hands repeating the keyboard and I think I honestly have no idea it's been a weird few years for a bunch of reasons and I have no idea how long the first draft took me to write I'm quite a quick writer but also I need a lot of procrastination time as I say I'm not counting that because obviously that's I'm not going to procrastination in fact the procrastination took me about six years but it took me six weeks of actually realising I hadn't I mean I'd written it but I hadn't written it because I didn't really write it in that discipline I just didn't have the chunk of time to do that and this was mainly written at nights and in spaces in between as I think lots of people's books are yeah I don't know really whenever I have a deadline I'm so sorry I wish my agent or my editor weren't here whenever I have a deadline it's sort of I say the deadline's three weeks away it's sort of two and a half weeks of faffing about and saying I'll never write it that is every writing I think so, I hope so and when you try and I once as a columnist tried to do something ahead of deadline and I was very proud of that and then I read it and it lacked any elasticity or life because it wasn't written with that it didn't have the fear driving it but I think also if you I think if you had to write a column so I wrote a column for three years and so I wrote a couple of columns and having that weekly deadline always always right up to the please could you, Ella could you please could we have it by the end of the day? We need it tomorrow tomorrow it's in the paper and I again I think once you learn to write with that kind of drive of well get it in this is the latest possible but then I think I was like that at school anyway I think I'm just always a procrastinator we've got about ten more minutes here so I want to get more questions one here we'll have to be quicker with our answers okay it'll be really quite quick both of your books and your stars writing are very much tired with the idea of food being something that's comforting not necessarily something that requires a lot of effort but even preparing it is like you said it's the ritual of doing it is quite wonderful I was just wondering is there a dish, not necessarily a recipe but a dish that you find is your go-to comfort food like mine is the chocolate fudge cake in bites that page is stained chocolate it's been scribbled all over it but it's great for me but what would that be for you I don't know I think probably it would be a recipe I call my mother's praise chicken which I think is in kitchen and it's I don't know I mean in a way a roast chicken is the one that comforts me the most but in terms of the process and the smells in the house I think this is a chicken that's cooked in a pot with some leeks and carrots and water so I suppose that but I suppose it would be one of those but there is something I feel about just putting a chicken in a pot maybe some shallots and garlic cloves when it's in the oven that I do feel just doing that makes me feel very much a sense of being in my kitchen and just reminding myself I'm at home I think also chicken for me as well I think it's the kind of cooking in this book and then everything that can happen after I think it's the making the stock that I find very soothing I was extremely nervous about this event I have spent a day making a very elaborate stock sorry Tash the kitchen is very messy our kitchen is full of Tupperware that I have sort of half filled this stock and I was like I'm so late I'm covered in chicken I could tell why you smelt so comforting so there's a lot of sort of frantic shopping of just thinking like well the onions everything is going to be fine I don't have to do an event I don't have to leave the house I just thought if I made a very slow chicken stock it would it did help I felt much better by the time I got here but that or in terms of actual comfort there are times where you're just not really in the place to sit and go and buy a chicken because the thing about a chicken is it's not really in the house thing so anyone who left with things like cheese on toast or pesto pasta or spaghetti hoops with the little horrible sausages very delicious we might have time for maybe two more questions I think oh there's someone here and someone here hello in a world where recipes get copied stolen uncredited how you keep the will to live oh I love it really I think I prefer you know I prefer you know credit that's you do it and I think I try and do it but I don't think it happens very often I don't know I suppose you just have to stop yourself getting too worked up I mean I do feel to some extent so a lot of people aren't copying recipes you have this you know there's a limited number of ingredients people have the same idea things somehow get into the air and I but I do think that obviously there is a lot of plagiarism and I think that well I suppose in a way I feel that you know I used to say to my children when they were little that sometimes you know if they might have been copied at school you either you're either a follower or you're a leader in this life so you know if you lead you're going to be followed and it's maybe annoying but that's what happens you're saying you like it I think that particularly if you're a person who kind of came to cooking through reading lots of other people's recipes it feels to me always like I'm working kind of at the bottom of a very large sprawling family tree of people saying and it's one thing so this book it's 80,000 words about when I handed it in it was 160,000 words please feel sorry for my editor and a lot of that was me saying well I looked at this recipe first and I didn't really like it so I did this and crediting of six or seven people per recipe, none of whom had written the recipe but I was so I felt this debt to all the people who I was kind of riffing off or drawing on so sorry so I feel it's almost inevitable that it's going to happen because as you say limited ingredients and it's weird that an ingredient suddenly everywhere or a recipe like Turkish eggs is a thing I've seen lots of and seen lots of in cafes lately things sort of rise and fall bubbles they do but it's probably annoying if you've written a lot more books than me I've written one and not that many people plagiarise me to my knowledge I think sometimes it's more if something is you can tell when it is because obviously you have lots of people have same ideas often in any given time so I think that's but anyway I suppose that's how it happens yes it happens and I think it's always going to happen with recipes I live I'm much more frightened of plagiarising accidentally I'm terrified of that that I will have thought somethings my idea because I've eaten it or read about it and forgotten where it comes from I do live in terror of that I think we have one okay one two final questions one here and then one there and then hi I just wanted to ask you what gets you excited about writing now I mean Nigella you've written so many books and Ella it's your first book is it the pleasure of sharing it is the pleasure of sharing but in terms of writing I think writing it's a really strange thing because it's a bit like pouring candle wax from hot candle on your hand because it hurts but it's also kind of pleasurable at the same time so I don't know that you get excited about writing about conveying enthusiasm I think yeah and a sentence is you know you're playing with the words a good sentence isn't satisfying I don't think I feel excited about writing per se it's just what I do I don't really know any other way to be which sounds awful but it's true there are lots more things that are more fun than writing I mean going for a walk seeing a dog, telly, eating, cooking and yet somehow I still do it why? I don't know I'm very sad if I'm not doing it I'm quite sad when I'm doing it but what makes you excited about writing is a strange question for me because it's something I I have really never given any thought to whether I'm like am I enjoying this I don't know which feels like one of those copper answers of like no writing is as natural to me as breathing because of course it's work but it's a job and it's my job and it would be my job whether I've never got paid for it again if that makes sense one final question up here up here many of us have memories of foods that we've had in the past whether it's something our parents made or a family member or a friend have you ever tried to recreate those recipes and come up on a hurdle and say why is it I'm not getting this right? so someone actually asked me about this at another event and I have an answer ready for you it's not something that someone made for me so I spent part of my childhood at school in the Middle East and there's this Lebanese cheese bread we call it Lebanese cheese bread I think it's proper, my name is Manakish you make it with the kind of cheese apparently I have heard there is a deli in shepherd's bush that has it sometimes damn a skate yes but I have tried to recreate this cheese bread it was so delicious, so we had a break and the thing is was it this delicious because I was 16 and having a break from revision I don't know was it just a very delicious cheese bread it was like imagine a very soft delicious potato that's also pillowy and then it's stuffed with a cheese that's kind of like halfway between halloumi and mozzarella with a weird sharpness it's very delicious but I have tried to recreate it with various other cheeses and various kinds of bread dough and I can't get it right and I've tried various recipes online and in cookbooks and I've never made one that tastes correct but my friend Chris Cassane is a food historian and he has a lot of interesting things to say as you do in your book about being able to recreate the foods past even if you eat a grape you say in your book even if you eat a grape now it's not the same as a grape 50 years ago if you eat a banana now it's not the same as a pre-war banana but even if it's not the same as your taste buds exactly, you can't really jump in the same river you can't jump in the same river twice in terms of eating cheese bread because how much of that was I'm 16 I can leave school in my free period and eat cheese bread if I want which you're never going to have nothing's ever as free as being like there's a space on my timetable between maths and French and I can go to a shop so yes I have tried to recreate that and I've never got that right also my mum's fish lasagna which sounds disgusting but was really nice I've never made it, it's never been good I've never made it successfully it's always been horrible but it was really nice we used to have it after swimming I don't know I think that I've done my best to recreate recipes from my past because my mother died very young and so I had to as a grown up try and make her food from memory now I've wanted to bridge that gap and make it but I couldn't help but bring this self I was so many into the cooking so I think for example when I do my mother's praised chicken, I think I'm recreating her chicken and I'm probably not I'm probably not but maybe the smell is the same there's something about the smell in the air and it probably isn't really cooked in the exact same way and so I think it's enough you get bits of it but in a way even when every time I cook a particular recipe it's different so if it's different when it's one of something I've cooked let alone when it's something I'm trying to recreate so I think but I think you have a this sounds really pretentious but you have a communion with the past that makes you feel you're recreating something or makes you feel you're having an exchange with the past that feels like it means something I think that's so wonderful now to which to end because I was one of my final things was going to be that for both of you recipes are memories as well which is something we haven't really talked about but it's absolutely interwoven in both these books but all of you who haven't already got them should buy both these books and I'm sure you'll join me in thanking two absolutely wonderful awesome awesome