Although there are standardly formatted recipes, there are far, far more suggestions of how recipes can be altered or modified or mixed and matched. In the midst of turmoil it’s reassuring to have something tried and tested, something reliable by an expert (that word) in their field, that will produce pleasure and satisfaction for oneself and others. Dedicated chapters include 'A is for Anchovy' (a celebration of the bacon of the sea), 'Rhubarb' , 'A Loving Defence of Brown Food' , a suitably expansive chapter devoted to family dinners, plus inspiration for vegan feasts and solo suppers. joyous, gorgeous, glorious, lavish, spectacular, expansive, celebratory, unrestrained, blissful, spirit-lifting. It is also not the easiest binding to keep open at the chosen pages when the time comes to get in the kitchen and cook!

I did hint strongly that I wanted this book, but my family know that the latest Nigella cookbook will always be a popular present with me. This is dense, essay-style food writing although it’s clear enough when it comes to the fundamentals (measurements, timings, ingredients, etc). This one isn't so much a typical cookbook (though I do love those) as much as it is a loose-formed memoir, a free-verse association on the texture and depth food adds to our lives—complete with a host of beautiful, uncomplicated things to eat.Cook, eat, repeat is a delicious and delightful combination of recipes intertwined with narrative essays about food, all written in Nigella’s engaging and insightful prose. Writing a cookbook, especially one that envisions family gatherings and entertaining around a table of food must have been particularly challenging. Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. Neither tasted exactly as they would had they come from Nigella Lawson’s hands, but both were very good and I will definitely use both recipes again.

I appreciate all the info given at the start of recipes for how to adapt them to suit different dietary requirements, but there's a lot of these I'll never cook due to the large number of meaty dishes or just flavours that aren't my cup of tea (namely rhubarb and anchovies! As Cook, Eat, Repeat was written during a pandemic, she’s made changes to some of her original ideas about entertaining at holidays or just having friends over for a dinner party.I enter into the exuberance, but a continuous diet (true of any stylistic author, including Wodehouse, Trollope, Dickens, Karon, and others) of Nigella drains the sparkplugs.

Oh, and there are many wonderful sounding recipes— and food notes, variations, and asides— that I plan on trying. These are the type used by Nigella and her descriptions of the ways to prepare them ( the tinned variety) really whetted my appetite. She doesn’t believe in guilty pleasures—she thinks of all eating as pleasure and doesn’t believe in feeling guilty for that. Food, for me, is a constant pleasure: I like to think greedily about it, reflect deeply on it, learn from it; it provides comfort, inspiration, meaning and beauty, as well as sustenance and structure.I prefer the format of previous cookbooks where she gives a page or so of thoughts about a recipe and then moves on. I can at the end of all this, however, recommend the black forest brownies and the spiced bulgur wheat.