An ode to Nigella, my Christmas Queen

The latest Instagram trend to make me feel like Grandpa Simpson is #2006vs2016. I think I’m mostly envious because there are no adorably photogenic photos of me taken a decade ago. It’s almost a year to the day that I was dumped for the very first time. I was in my third year of university, I hadn’t yet learned that eyeliner doesn’t necessarily have to be black, kohl or applied to the entire outer lash and inner rim, and I was consumed with terror because I knew that this was the last Christmas that I could get away with dithering about in the not-quite-adult half way house of studentiness.

Christmas 2006 was perilously close to 2007, a year that was going to be, to put it euphemistically, a challenge; personally, professionally and academically. It might be the last time that I was ‘coming home’ for Christmas — but what if I was still living at home next Christmas? Or, more likely, what if my family and me had all murdered each other while there were still leaves on the trees? My last ever student loan instalment was coming in January — what on earth was I going to use to get Christmas presents next year? Love? Sexual favours? Newly acquired shoplifting skills?

Also, I longed to bring a festive aesthetic into our student house. I dreamed of hosting twinkly, cinnamon scented drinks parties, ideally wearing something ivy green and low cut while my ex gazed lustfully and sadly at me from across the room, fingering the Cartier box in his coat pocket and trying to pluck up the courage to give it to me while whispering “I made a terrible mistake. Can we start again?” Given the most exciting gift he’d given me over the course of our relationship was a fridge magnet shaped like a pint of Guinness, this seemed unlikely. Also, I lived with boys who did not appreciate the festive aesthetic, to the point of leaving mouldy tea bags under the branches of the tiny twelve inch tree I bought from Wilko, and unplugging the fairy lights because they were reflecting off the telly screen and they wanted to sit with the curtains drawn and play Zelda. Also, it was tights-under-your-jeans cold and the central heating didn’t work. A bleak house.

Yet, back in 2006, I had Nigella. It’s also almost exactly ten years to the day that Nigella’s Christmas Kitchen first aired on BBC2. Like everyone else in the world, I can never quite put my finger on whether I want to have sex with Nigella or be adopted by her, but I do know that I’d sit, puffy faced and clutching a soggy bowl of off brand All Bran, sobbing with longing as I dreamed about having her kitchen, her skills, her life. Nigella is a woman for all seasons, but she could be the secular patron saint of Christmas. This is the time when she comes into her own.

As I write this, I’ve got a separate YouTube tab open, to watch back to back Christmas Kitchen — I can’t see her while I’ve got a word doc open, but I can hear her soothing, crackling vetiver voice. You want to pour it on toast. She possesses the sort of rare beauty which deepens in proportion to the time you spend gazing upon it. It’s been said before that Nigella could make a whole series based on opening tins of beans, and the nation would watch rapturously. (In fact, I think last series’ caesar salad/avocado on toast controversy was born from this — if you’re complaining that avo toast isn’t a recipe, you don’t understand about Nigella at all.)

I’m so addicted. The split second, unbearably erotic sigh as she opens a jar of dried cranberries, explaining “These will glisten like garnets later.” The sorry-not-sorry justification as her guests arrive and she pours them espresso martinis, each containing about 27 units of alcohol. The cake, shaped like an alpine village, where she bashes it out and claims “the tin does all the work” like it ain’t no thing. The gingerbread stuffing which she invents because she believes that Jamaica ginger cake is an entirely sensible replacement for regular bread. As soon as the words fall from her mouth you think “Nigella, YES! Why don’t we use Jamaica ginger cake for sandwiches? Normal bread is for chumps!”

In a way, these videos haven’t dated at all, and I want to make and eat everything just as desperately as I did a decade ago. Yet, there’s something safe and sweet and cosy about hiding in the past. With the benefit of hindsight, I can enjoy 2006 much more today than I did during the year itself. Globally, life feels desperately scary and uncertain right now. We’re also coming out of the end of a desperate, gruelling era in which aspirational eating has involved undressed leaves and almond milk, and the girls we want and want to be don’t lick the spoon. Watching Nigella after being exposed to endless, earnest clean eating discussions is like waking up on Easter Sunday and putting your whole head in a chocolate egg, like a fencing mask, after 40 days of Lenten bread and water.

I love to cook, and I think I’m pretty good at it. Also, it’s the one hobby I have that doesn’t really have a use outside the home. There’s a sensual, visceral joy that I get from feeding the people I love (including myself) but it’s not an activity that is connected with professional betterment, or pursuing goals. It’s also the one thing I do that isn’t fraught with anxiety, analysis or the agony of comparison. I don’t have to compare my cooking to anyone else’s. When I’m in the kitchen, I’m not worried about fucking up. It’s the only thing I can do by eye, the only place where I truly trust my instincts. I fell in love with Nigella in the Christmas of 2006 because she cooks like she’s dancing, or like she’s having sex. She’s confident, she’s joyful, she’s in control — or rather, she’s so relaxed that control isn’t an issue. When I cook, I feel like Nigella, which has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with her presence and power. I’ve never met her, but she’s given me a gift that has brought me ten years of joy — and I know there’s more to come.

Whenever friends are gathered together, eating on settees and sofas, beanbags and Ikea folding chairs, Nigella is there. Whenever someone peers at a saucepan, makes a thoughtful face and then lobs in another inch of butter, Nigella is there. Whenever the recipe calls for a splash of brandy, and the cook pours a generous double shot, then another for themselves, Nigella is there. If you’ve got fairy lights in your kitchen in July, if you cook to Sarah Vaughn and Dinah Washington, if the idea of whacking your crème brûlée crust with the back of a spoon makes you catch your breath, if you’ve ever bought champagne simply to celebrate the fact that champagne is half price, Nigella is in you. She’s in me too.

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