Nigella Lawson: Too much pressure on parents to make cooking fun

Domestic godess: Nigella Lawson
11 April 2012
The Weekender

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Parents are under too much pressure to behave like children's TV presenters in the kitchen, domestic goddess Nigella Lawson said.

The TV chef, 50, told the Radio Times that when she was taught to cook by her mother and grandmother their culinary efforts were seen as a chore - but it did not stop her learning the ropes.

Today's parents, she suggested, mistakenly believed they had to make cooking "all fun and recreational".

Lawson said: "My mother was a great believer in child labour. From quite a young age, five and six probably, my sister and I would be propped up on rickety wooden chairs and put to work."

She added: "I think there was a different view of childhood then - we were expected to be useful to our parents. So we were trained up very early and we all took turns cooking my father's (former chancellor Nigel Lawson's) breakfast."

The mother of two said: "Nowadays, I think parents sometimes feel they have to get into children's television presenter mode and make cooking all fun and recreational, whereas we were just required to help get a meal on the table.

"It just felt normal. I didn't realise I was learning to cook."

She told the magazine: "My mother was a fantastic cook, but often she would be whipping up a mayonnaise, as we helped, with resentment, because she had four children to tend to and you can't be looking after a family of four and constantly be thinking, 'Oh, this is great'."

The food writer, who served up her first dish on her own, a steamed jam roly poly, at the age of 10, added: "It becomes a chore, because in many ways it is."

Lawson, whose new TV series Nigella's Kitchen is about to be shown on BBC2, admitted that she does "not cook seven different things in a week" and that her teenage children, Cosima, 16, who is known as Mimi, and Bruno, 14, eat a lot of pasta.

The cookery star, whose first husband John Diamond died of throat cancer, said: "I remember once when the children were little, I made home-made pizzas in the shape of giraffes and other animals and they asked me, 'Can we have pizza out of a box like daddy?'... Mimi's idea of a treat for tea would be moules mariniere and... Bruno used to like squid tentacles, though I have to say now they wouldn't eat either."

Lawson, who married art collector Charles Saatchi in 2003, said of how she responded when her children rejected her meals: "You can't make a deal of it. The important thing is they behave themselves when they are out."

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