Feast or How to Be a Domestic Goddess

Feast: Food to Celebrate Life

Author: Nigella Lawson

Feast is written to stand alongside Nigella’s classic and best loved book, How to Eat. Comprehensive and informed, this stunning new book will be equally at home in the kitchen or on the bedside table.
A feast for both the eyes and the senses, written with Nigella Lawson’s characteristic flair and passion, Feast: Food that Celebrates Life is a major book in the style of her classic How to Eat, applying Nigella’s “Pleasures and Principles of Good Food” to the celebrations and special occasions of life.
Essentially about families and food, about public holidays and private passions, about how to celebrate the big occasions and the small everyday pleasures — those times when food is more than just fuel — Feast takes us through Christmas, Thanksgiving and birthdays, to Passover and a special Sardinian Easter; from that first breakfast together to a meal fit for the in-laws; from seasonal banquets of strawberries or chestnuts to the ultimate chocolate cake; from food for cheering up the “Unhappy Hour” to funeral baked-meats; from a Georgian feast to a love-fest; from Nigella’s all-time favourite dish to a final New Year fast.
Evocative, gorgeous, refreshingly uncomplicated and full of ideas, Feast proclaims Nigella’s love of life and great food with which to celebrate it. Packed with over 200 recipes from all over the world — and from near home — with helpful menus for whole meals, and more than 120 colour photographs, Feast is destined to become a classic.

The New York Times - Korby Cummer

Lawson is always full of good sense, but she strikes me as exceptionally sensible in her chapter on cooking for children.

Wine News

The genius on display here is the exotic combination of irony, joie de vivre, curiosity and nurturing.

Publishers Weekly

"Cooking has many functions, and only one of them is about feeding people," writes Lawson in a cookbook that makes the preparation of Thanksgiving, Christmas and other feasts seem so approachable and richly rewarding that it may coax even hardcore cynics or cowards to give roast turkey with all the trimmings a try. For starters, there is Lawson's star quality. "When we go into a kitchen, indeed when we even just think about going into a kitchen, we are both creating and responding to an idea we hold about ourselves, about what kind of person we wish to be." The person that Lawson has demonstrated a wish to be while cooking on her TV show Nigella Bites and in her cookbooks (How to Be a Domestic Goddess, etc.) is a woman in full, alive in body and mind. Lawson has always playfully gloried in the erotic possibilities of cooking. She has always proclaimed herself an eater rather than a chef, but what she is really is a marvelous, funny food writer for our pressured times. She knows exactly how to balance her relish of the earthy with just the right twist of smarty-pants, Oxford-inflected wit. Explaining, for example, why she now chooses to bake stuffing in a terrine, she hastens to note that while she is "perfectly happy with my arm up a goose as I ram it with compacted sauerkraut, or whatever the occasion demands, I find turkey-wrangling just one psycho-step too far. The bird is too heavy, the cavity too small, and the job is just too tragi-comic to be managed alone and after all that Christmas wrapping, too." Lawson knows how to make her readers fall in love (or at least in lust) with her. Readers will come away from this book with a sense of what she thinks is worth loving. Along with her recipes for Christmas pudding or her "amplification" of her mother's green beans (involving "vicious amounts of lemon"), Lawson teaches what is primal and timeless about feasting. "I am not someone who believes that life is sacred, but I know it is very precious," she writes in a final section about funeral feasts that describes Mormon potatoes and Jewish eggs, comfort food to remind the bereaved "that life goes on, that living is important." She ends the book with Rosemary Remembrance Cake in honor of her grandmother Rosemary (and anybody else who happens to have read Shakespeare and knows that rosemary is for remembrance). Lawson shows that creating a feast doesn't just nourish the body and the mind-it creates an even more interesting self that also has a heart, whose function is remembering. 150 color photos. Author tour. (Nov.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Interesting book: Families and Poverty or Entrepreneurship

How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking

Author: Nigella Lawson

Now in paperback, the cookbook in which Nigella Lawson shows us how to release the domestic goddess inside each of us

"The trouble with much modern cooking is not that the food it produces isn't good, but that the mood it induces in the cook is one of skin-of-the-teeth efficiency, all briskness and little pleasure. Sometimes that's the best we can manage, but at other times we don't want to feel like a postmodern, postfeminist, overstretched woman but, rather, like a domestic goddess, trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in our languorous wake . . ."

How to Be a Domestic Goddess, filled with more than 220 lavishly illustrated recipes, makes cooking and baking as luxurious as it should be, with recipes for cakes, pies, pastries, and breads, and feeds our fantasies of making sumptuous treats at home.

Nigella Lawson is one of the world's most influential food writers. Her column appears every other week in the Dining In section of the New York Times, and she appears regularly on the Today show. In 2002, she was named "Tastemaker of the Year" at Bon Appétit's fifth annual American Food & Entertaining Awards. She is the author of four other cookbooks: How to Eat, Nigella Bites, Forever Summer, and Feast. She lives in London.

Gourmet

England's it girl . . . She cooks, she writes, she looks like a movie star . . . Nigella Lawson has the whole country talking.

New York Daily News

Her cookbook, written in a warm, familiar style, is sure to win her many fans on this side of the Atlantic.

Publishers Weekly

Called "England's it girl" by Gourmet magazine, Lawson (How to Eat) brings to America her second cookbook, highly popular in England. Lawson, the food editor for British Vogue, suggests ways to feel like a domestic goddess (rather than undergo the necessary lifestyle changes to become one), taking cooks back to an era of less stress and more simple pleasures. The recipes, written in Lawson's characteristic lively, witty manner, encourage this theme. The Store-Cupboard Chocolate-Orange Cake will please the nose with its rich, intense aroma and indulge the taste buds with its full chocolate and orange flavor. The Coconut Macaroons seem soft and chewy with a concentrated coconut essence (though they may need to bake for slightly longer than the suggested 20 minutes). The chapters cover categories from cakes to pies and from chocolate to Christmas. One chapter includes recipes for kid foods as well as recipes that children can follow. The book is designed to instill confidence and capability, positing that if Nigella can make these delights with ease and in a relaxed manner, so can anyone else, "trailing nutmeggy fumes." The beautiful color photos set the mouth to watering. (Nov.) Forecast: Timed to launch with her television series Nigella Bites on the E! channel and Style networks this fall, this book will bask in the warm, fuzzy and competent glow of Lawson's renown. She'll be a hit in the U.S.; her book will get ample promo and fly off the shelves. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.