Nigella Lawson: Don't be afraid to cook

Nigella Lawson, the British cookbook author and Food Network celebrity, came through town recently to promote her newest book, Nigella Kitchen: Recipes From the Heart of the Home (Hyperion), a book that has been "simmering" in her mind for a decade, a chronicle, as she says, of her "love affair with the kitchen."

She chatted with us at 10 Arts Bistro and Lounge at the Ritz-Carlton, while munching on a mini hot dog and soft pretzels. In person, Lawson is even more stunning than on television - with flawless skin - and she is disarmingly down-to-earth. Yes, she said, there are plenty of nights she doesn't feel like cooking; no, her teenage kids don't eat everything; and her life is far less glamorous than television might suggest.

Q. You've never been to cooking school. Did your mother teach you to cook?

A. My mother didn't teach me, she just put a chair by the stove and said, "Stir that." We cooked with her. It wasn't all sweetness and light, but she was a very good cook, and what I learned from her was that the only thing you can trust is your instinct. So I was quite lucky, because I believe that is the only way to cook.

Q. Now it seems chefs and celebs dominate the conversation about how to cook. Why?

A. Don't you think it's a strange modern disease, this idea of everyone having to be an expert? People are always thinking they need an expert on child-rearing and cooking, the two things that have kept the human race going. You don't really need expertise. You do the best you can. In a way, the professional is very far removed from how people really cook. When I watch great chefs, I think it's fantastic, but what they are doing is really more akin to theater. It's pleasing to the senses, but it relies on a degree of shock value, a need to be novel, that is out of place in real life.

Q. In one of your early books, How to Be a Domestic Goddess, you encouraged women to get back in the kitchen to reclaim "our Eden" and avoid "the skin of the teeth efficiency of all briskness, little pleasure." But now so much of your books is devoted to quick and easy. Is that simply what people want?