On the 20th anniversary of Nigella Lawson’s Feast, Ben Jureidini asked Britain’s most iconic home cook what the book meant to her. He also asked his Mum. 

My mother said she would stuff the goose herself. Yes, she knew it was the first time her in-laws had spent Christmas together since the Lebanese civil war (and the marginally less bellicose divorce). They could hash that out over the ham. No. The only help she needed was from the woman in the cookbook: her eyes knowing, yet warm; her smile generous, yet sly; her arm elbow-deep in the orifice of a waterfowl that was once capable of mating for life.

I didn’t expect Nigella Lawson to respond when I told her about that Christmas dinner. Mum had cooked it 20 years ago, the same year Feast was published, and prepared the entire meal using the book. To reach out to the cook about her memories of Feast seemed akin to dropping Ian McEwan an email to see if he had any strong feelings about Atonement. Did you get chilly painting The Starry Night, Mr Van Gogh? But respond Nigella Lawson did, and warmly: 

Feast lurked at the back of my mind for quite some time before I started working on it,” she told me. “I became more and more interested in how vital – beyond sustenance – food is to the rituals of being human. The context of food, what it means, at a personal, familial, cultural level, is what I wanted to reflect on.”

One such ritual, the reuniting of a family separated by wars and by oceans, was very much confined to the living room on the 25th of December 2004. In the kitchen, Mum had more immediate matters to attend to. 

“I like a bit of gynae work in the kitchen,” beams Lawson in Feast, “and I am perfectly happy with my arm up a goose.” This is followed by a winking aside to “see page 21”.  And so, my mother dutifully followed the instructions for a ‘Bohemian Roast Goose’, hardback cover propped up by a jam-stained wooden spoon, family reunion gaining exponentially in volume next door – Lawson herself grinning out of page 21, goose triumphantly impaled on her fist. 

Obstetrics aside, Feast laid out a cosmopolitan ethos of inter-cultural culinary communion. “We humans use food to mark the occasions that matter to us in life,” Lawson tells me. “Birthdays; anniversaries; weddings and funerals; religious festivals; it’s the currency of celebration and belonging.” 

“Nigella had told us how to eat,” says Gilly Smith, food writer and Lawson’s biographer, “I think Feast is why to eat.” Indeed, Lawson’s 1998 debut How to Eat had a goal much the same as Feast: removing the anxiety of hosting, putting the joy back into a British food culture that had become more about ego-inflating than enjoying, more about recreating a restaurant in your living room than welcoming your friends to a meal. The genesis of How to Eat was Lawson overhearing a friend sobbing in the kitchen over a failed dinner party. “Something [was] going wrong here,” she told The Cut in 2018, “people think they have to perform.”

“I stumbled into becoming a food writer quite by accident, really,” says Lawson. “Perhaps the most important things in life are never really planned – or, certainly, rarely go to plan.” She regards her career as “something of a happy accident.” How to Eat garnered wild success, but that in itself was a poisoned champagne flute. Lawson cooked, wrote, hosted with such (apparent) easy glamour, such laid-back spontaneity that she herself inspired exactly the sort of aspirational anxiety she aimed to eradicate. Smith sees it as a contradiction in terms: “She created a kind of capital: ‘cook like me and you can have my kind of lifestyle’. A lot of people would cook like Nigella did in order to impress, not to feed.” 

Cooking Nigella’s Christmas ham

Feast was an attempt to rectify that. By looking outward to cultures where feasting and fasting have ritual functions ­– welcoming, celebrating, mourning – Nigella’s writing was no longer about the suburban apotheosis of home cook into domestic goddess, but about communication and care. 

And it all started closer to home. “Feast started off as funeral food,” says Smith. Lawson’s husband, John Diamond, passed away in 2001. In the wake of his death, she turned to the traditions of their shared secular Jewish heritage. “She realised that her Jewish traditions were all about feasting with people, for a shared event,” Smith continues. “It was the first time she looked at her own Jewishness like that.”

The book ends with “Funeral Feasts”, and Lawson balances sorrow and pragmatism. Hamine eggs, a traditional Sephardi food of mourning, are described as sans bouche, without mouths – “I find that appropriate,” she writes, “there is nothing to be said, or nothing that helps.” When pairing Mormon funeral potatoes with British baked ham, however, she notes that “if cooking gammon in cherry Coke seems insufficiently dignified for the occasion, replace with regular coke and remind yourself that the dark colour of the libation is fitting.”

Funerals, yes, but Valentine’s Day feasts (“jellies quiver with passion”), midnight feasts (carbonara to be “sparingly slurped” in bed after a first date), feasts for Eid and feasts for Christmas (“what’s left after stuffing your bird?” Answer: “a clamouring to get on to other meats”). The book is written with a ferocious intelligence, one that delights in the “Wildean” artifice of a homemade custard cream and makes more than one reference to French structuralism. It is also written with the wink-wink nudge-nudge innuendo that led crime writer Jonathan Coe to include a chapter where his detective gets a semi for a sexy TV chef while doing the ironing. 

“Making cupcakes and talking Baudrillard? Bloody hell, the world went mad for it,” says Smith. But she wonders if Lawson’s sheer charisma left Feast in the same double-bind as How To Eat: “Feast is very much Nigella’s own personality on these rituals. She writes recipes, she doesn’t record history. Perhaps when people are actually feasting they want to remember ancestors and times gone by and to be authentic.”

The question of authenticity is a tired one, especially for women in the public eye. Now, 20 years on, Nigella’s star is no longer ascendant but fixed stratospherically high: Eurovision host, Love of Huns camp icon, unapologetically urban, and still a phenomenally charismatic cook. She is reticent, however, to discuss cultural questions with the same profundity as she did in Feast two decades ago. “She’s a brilliant writer and a big thinker,” says Smith of her many conversations with Lawson, “but she doesn’t use her platform … to talk about identity and belonging. She just doesn’t.”

So was Feast a success? Or do some see it as the kind of culinary performance Lawson was trying to unpick with her books? It’s still Smith’s favourite book. To this day, she cooks the haroset for Passover dinner, dense, sticky figs boiled with figs and apricots and sweet wine. The book offered her access to the rituals of a culture she married into: I didn’t have any access to that other than Nigella. She’s like my Jewish best friend.”

“Of course, different cultures choose and use food in differing ways, and in markedly different contexts,” reflects Lawson. “But it seems to me – and this was really the impetus behind Feast – that this is something so essential to being human, being alive in the world, and making meaning in life. Hence Feast’s subtitle: ‘Food that Celebrates Life’.”

My mother still uses Feast for Christmas. Most of the family has either returned to Lebanon, died, or gone vegan (“rather like exercises,” writes Lawson, “it’s fine if someone else is doing it”), but each year a four-kilogram gammon plunges into a four litre vat of apple and cranberry juice. Each year the kitchen smells of cloves and cinnamon. “You want me to remember Christmas 20 years ago?” Mum asks, probably already laying the table for December, eight months in advance. “Your grandmother came over from Beirut and didn’t know how escalators worked.” Right. Why Feast? “It was cosmopolitan,” she says. “I like Nigella, I think we’d get on.” She looks down at the photo on the cover of the book: “And she stuffs a great goose.”