How To Be A Domestic Goddess - Softcover

Lawson, Nigella

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0701171081 ISBN 13: 9780701171087

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2003

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

Here is the book that feeds our fantasies, understands our anxieties and puts cakes, pies, pastries, preserves, puddings, bread and biscuits back into our own kitchens. With a writer's flair and a cook's passion, Nigella brings you everything from brownies to bagels, from gooseberry-cream crumble to double apple pie, from pizza to pistachio macaroons, from festive bake to Barbie cake.

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

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0701171081
• ISBN 13: 9780701171087
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384