How to be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking - Softcover

Lawson, Nigella

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0676974112 ISBN 13: 9780676974119

Publisher: Knopf Canada, 2003

Synopsis

Now in paperback: the gorgeous, bestselling modern classic puts baking back on the agenda, and makes it simple and alluring for today’s cook.

How to be a Domestic Goddess is not about being a goddess, but about feeling like one. What this deliciously reassuring and mouthwatering cookbook demonstrates is that it’s not hard to bake a tray of muffins or a sponge layer cake -- but the rewards they bring are disproportionately high.

Here is the book that feeds our fantasies, understands our anxieties and puts cakes, pies, pastries, preserves, puddings, bread and biscuits right back into our kitchens and our lives. There’s everything from cupcakes to chocolate cakes; from brownies to bagels; from gooseberry-cream crumble to double apple pie; from pizza to pistachio macaroons; scones and muffins; cheesecakes and steamed syrup sponge; from baklava to a Barbie cake; as well as children’s cooking, Christmas baking and other wonderful family festive treats -- all illustrated with ravishing photographs throughout.

About this title

Review:

Those who love comfort food have cause to be grateful for Nigella Lawson's book How to Be a Domestic Goddess. Cause, too, perhaps, to wonder that she isn't the size of a house, since baked comfort foods typically encompass large quantities of butter, cream, eggs, sugar, chocolate, nuts, cream cheese and all the other foodstuffs to which with dreary inevitability attaches the deadly word "sinful". But in Nigella Lawson's hands these dangerous, even feared, substances are transmuted alchemically into the healing balms of the goddess, who presides (perhaps a little ironically) over a harmonious kitchen realm.

The recipes are suitably divine, covering cakes, biscuits, pies, puddings, breads, with special sections on cooking for (and by) children and Christmas. Most are sweet, though there is a choice selection of savoury pies and puddings--Pizza Rustica, Steak and Kidney Pudding, Cornish Pasties. The sweet things range from the airy elegance of Pistachio Macaroons, through the luscious spiciness of Norwegian Cinnamon Buns, to the trailer-trashiness of Coca-Cola Cake.

Nigella Lawson's poise never falters, whether she is discussing serving mulled wine with mince pies ("Don't fight it") or a strange passion-fruit liqueur required for one of her trifles ("the most divinely camp liqueur you could ever come across"). She plays a kind of game with her readers, insisting constantly on her greed, but really invoking our own. What a fascinating book: hints of obsessiveness revealed behind the beautifully projected personality of a laid-back voluptuary.--Robin Davidson

Review:

'the bible for the yummy-mummy generation' --The Guardian

'Her prose is as nourishing as her recipes' --Salman Rushdie, Observer

'I love Nigella Lawson's writing and I love her recipes' --Delia Smith

'Cerebral and scintillating advice for the hungry, peppered with wit' --Sunday Times

'Passionate, informative, detailed, bossy and admirably practical' --Evening Standard

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Canada
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0676974112
• ISBN 13: 9780676974119
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384