Nigella Lawson: iVillage

5 Great Recipes from Nigella Lawson

Nigella Lawson is one of the best and most influential British food writers of her generation. Here, she shares recipes from one of her most successful books, Nigella Bites.

Nigella's fabulous recipes - chic but irresistibly homely - and fluid, accessible writing style have made her into a household name. Thousands have identified with her unique approach to food - which never ignores that women, as well as enjoying the many delights of the kitchen, and the joy to be had from sharing them with others, also hold down jobs and lead busy lives.

Nigella Bites (Chatto & Windus, £20) is one of many bestsellers to have flown from the pen of Ms Lawson. It accompanied her Channel 4 series and offers uncomplicated, original, fresh recipes. They're easy to produce after a busy day at the office, fun to linger over at weekends or to make with the kids. Her cooking symbolises all that is best, most pleasurable and least fussy about the place of good food in our lives.

Nigella's Bites:

Nigella’s Chocolate Fudge Cake

Choc Fudge Cake I have a bad Amazon habit. You know the ‘when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping’ line? Well, the not-so-tough get their retail therapy online. Or I do: when I can’t sleep I start ordering books. And I comfort myself twice over by telling myself how useful they are, how they really help my work. I offer this recipe, adapted from a book that in itself soothes, Tish Boyle’s Diner Desserts, bought at 3am one unravellingly wakeful night, as proof.

This is the sort of cake you’d want to eat the whole of when you’d been chucked. But even the sight of it, proud and tall and thickly iced on its stand, comforts.

Serves 10. Or 1 with a broken heart

For the cake:
400g plain flour
250g golden caster sugar
100g light muscovado sugar
50g best quality cocoa powder
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
½ tsp salt
3 eggs
142ml/small tub sour cream
1 tbsp vanilla extract
175g unsalted butter, melted and cooled
125ml corn oil
300ml chilled water

For the fudge icing:
175g dark chocolate, minimum 70% cocoa solids
250g unsalted butter, softened
275g icing sugar, sifted
1 tbsp vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4.
Butter and line the bottom of two 20cm sandwich tins.
In a large bowl, mix together the flour, sugars, cocoa, baking powder, bicarb and salt. In another bowl or wide-necked measuring jug whisk together the eggs, sour cream and vanilla until blended.
Using a freestanding or handheld electric mixer, beat together the melted butter and corn oil until just blended (you’ll need another large bowl for this if using the hand whisk; the freestanding mixer comes with its own bowl), then beat in the water. Add the dry ingredients all at once and mix together on a slow speed.
Add the egg mixture, and mix again until everything is blended and then pour into the prepared tins. And actually, you could easily do this manually; I just like my toys and find the KitchenAid a comforting presence in itself.
Bake the cakes for 50-55 minutes, or until a cake-tester comes out clean. Cool the cakes in their tins on a wire rack for 15 minutes, and then turn the cakes out onto the rack to cool completely.
To make the icing, melt the chocolate in the microwave – 2-3 minutes on medium should do it – or in a bowl sitting over a pan of simmering water, and let cool slightly.
In another bowl, beat the butter until it's soft and creamy (again, I use the KitchenAid here) and then add the sieved icing sugar and beat again until everything's light and fluffy. I know sieving is a pain, the one job in the kitchen I really hate, but you have to do it or the icing will be unsoothingly lumpy. Then gently add the vanilla and chocolate and mix together until everything is glossy and smooth.
Sandwich the middle of the cake with about a quarter of the icing, and then ice the top and sides, too, spreading and smoothing with a rubber spatula.

Egyptian Tomato Salad
I found this salad in a lovely little book – ‘A Memoir with Recipes’ – called Apricots on the Nile, by Colette Rossant. And although it sounds a lot of bother blanching and peeling the tomatoes, all in fact it involves is leaving the tomatoes for a few minutes in a bowlful of just-boiled water, after which their skins will come off without any trouble. It is worth doing this: the tomatoes will be more seductively tender and the nubbly dressing then permeates them better.

If a shallot is beyond you, use the white parts of two or three spring onions.

Serves 8

1 shallot, peeled
5 medium-sized vine tomatoes (approx 750g)
1 clove of garlic, peeled
3-4 tbsp olive oil
good squeeze of lemon juice, Maldon salt
salt and pepper
handful freshly chopped chervil

Chop the shallot and garlic as finely as is humanly possible – or just blitz to a pulp in a processor – and put in a small bowl with the oil, a pinch of salt and a grinding of pepper, and leave to steep while you blanch the tomatoes: that’s to say, put them in a large bowl then pour boiling water over them so that they are hotly submerged. Leave for 5 minutes then tip into a colander and run under cold water.
Using a sharp knife, peel off the skins (which is now easy), then cut these fuzzy spheres into slices, as thick or as thin as you like (I like them somewhere in the middle).
Arrange the tomatoes in a dish and pour over the dressing, using your fingers to mix well. I find it easier to use one bowl for steeping purposes and another one, later for serving. You can let the tomatoes sit like this for a good couple of hours. Yes some liquid will collect, but the flavours will deepen wonderfully.
When you’re ready to eat, either leave the dressed tomatoes in the bowl or decant to a new one, but either way, using your hands, turn them to coat, squeeze over some lemon juice, and sprinkle with Maldon salt and a tablespoon or so of freshly chopped chervil. Use another herb if you like, but there is one inflexible rule governing this salad: it must be served at room temperature. Leave it in the fridge until the last minute and all will be lost.

Vietnamese Chicken and Mint Salad
This is what I make when a girlfriend or two are coming over not so much for dinner as to talk or moan, as one does, during those chapter meetings of the martyred sisterhood. It’s very quick as long as you’ve got a food processor (and not that time-consuming without) and ideal for picking at with an outstretched fork over a drawn-out evening. The dressing needs to steep for half and hour, but you don’t need to do anything to it while it’s going on.

The recipe is adapted from the Best of Nicole Routhier and is, or so she explains, the Vietnamese equivalent of coleslaw, but this doesn’t quite sum up its fresh appeal and ability to spruce up a girl’s flagging spirits. This is a real reviver.

Serves 2-4

Since it’s easy to buy a chicken breast ready-cooked, that’s what I generally use, but obviously if you’ve got a leftover chicken in the fridge I suggest you use that. Likewise, consider using the baby cabbages you see around these days: they are exactly the size you need and easier than hacking away at a big bruiser. All the less familiar ingredients can, as ever, be bought at a supermarket. And by all means leave out the oil in the dressing if including it would make you feel less than virtuous.

This makes a lot, but I find it’s very easy to get through – and it stays in the fridge for a day or two to provide instant midnight pickings of not-too injurious sort.

1 chilli, preferably a hot Thai one, seeded and minced
1 fat garlic clove, peeled and minced
1 tbsp sugar
1 ½ tsp rice vinegar
1 ½ tbsp lime juice
1 ½ tbsp Vietnamese or Thai fish sauce (nuoc nam or nam pla)
1 ½ tbsp vegetable oil
half a medium onion, finely sliced
black pepper
200g white cabbage, shredded
1 medium carrot, shredded, julienned or grated
200g cooked chicken breast, shredded or cut into fine strips
fat bunch of mint, about 40g stemmed weight

In a bowl, combine the chilli, garlic, sugar, vinegar, lime juice, fish sauce, oil and onion and black pepper to taste. Put to one side for half an hour.
Then in a big plate or bowl, mix the cabbage, carrot, chicken and mint. Pour over the onion-soused, chilli-flecked dressing and toss very well – slowly and patiently – so that everything is combined and covered thinly. Taste to see if you need salt or pepper.
Serve on a flat plate with maybe a bit more mint chopped on top.

Ham in Coca-cola
This recipe is from How to Eat, with some rejigging (just because it’s not in my nature to leave completely alone), and I don’t apologise for reproducing, or rather recasting, it because I simply cannot urge you to try this strongly enough. The first time I made it, it was to be frank, really just out of amused interest. I’d heard, and read, about this culinary tradition from the deep South, but wasn’t expecting it, in all honestly, to be good. The truth is it’s magnificent, and makes converts of anyone who eats it. But, if you think about it, it’s not surprising it should work: the sweet, spiky drink just infuses it with sprit of barbecue. I have to force myself to cook ham any other way now; though often I don’t bother with the glaze but just leave it for longer in the bubbling coke instead.

And the salty, sweet liquor it leaves behind in the pot after it’s cooked makes an instant base for the most fabulous black bean soup.

But just one thing before we start: don’t even consider using Diet Coke; it’s full-fat or nothing.

Serves 8

2kg mild-cure gammon
1 onion, peeled and cut in half
2-litre bottle of Coca-Cola

For the glaze
handful of cloves
1 heaped tablespoon black treacle
2 tsp English mustard powder
2 tbsp demerara sugar

I find now that mild-cure gammon doesn’t need soaking, but if you know that you’re dealing with a salty piece, then put it in a pan covered with cold water, bring to the boil, then tip into a colander in the sink and start from here; otherwise, put the gammon in a pan, skin-side down if it fits like that, add the onion, then pour over the Coke.
Bring to the boil, reduce to a good simmer, put the lid on, though not tightly, and cook for just under 2 ½ hours. If your joint is larger or smaller, work out timing by reckoning on an hour per kilo, remembering that it’s going to get a quick blast in the oven later. But do take into account that if the gammon’s been in the fridge right up to the moment you cook it, you will have to give it a good 15 minutes or so extra so the interior is properly cooked.
Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 240°C/gas mark 9.
When the ham’s had its time (and ham it is, now it’s cooked, though it’s true Americans call it ham from its uncooked state) take it out of the pan (but do NOT throw away the cooking liquid) and let cool a little for ease of handling. (Indeed, you can let it cool completely then finish off the cooking at some later stage if you want.)
Then remove the skin, leaving a thin layer of fat. Score the fat with a sharp knife to make fairly large diamond shapes, and stud each diamond with a clove. Then carefully spread the treacle over the bark-budded skin, taking care not to dislodge the cloves. Gently pat the mustard and sugar onto the sticky fat.
Cook in a foil-lined roasting tin for approximately 10 minutes or until the glaze is burnished and bubbly.
Should you want to do the braising stage in advance and then let the ham cool, clove and glaze it and give it 30-40 minutes, from room temperature, at 180°C/gas mark 4, turning up the heat towards the end if you think it needs it.
Bitter Orange Ice-cream
I know that suggesting homemade ice-cream for an easy after-work supper makes me sound as if I’m going into deranged-superwoman overdrive, but may I put the case for the defence?
All you do to make this is zest and juice some fruit, add icing sugar and cream, whisk and freeze. This requires no stirring or churning and it tastes unlike anything you could buy. So if you’ve got friends coming over for dinner, you can serve this for pudding without giving yourself anything approaching a hard time. I use my Kitchen Aid, but a cheap hand-held electric mixer would do fine; and frankly, a hand whisk wouldn’t kill you.
I first made this with Seville oranges, but since these are available only in January here, it would be unhelpfully restricting to suggest no substitutes out of season (though you could always freeze the oranges, either whole or just their zest and juice). I won’t lie to you and say that my suggested substitutes are quite as magnificent as the original – nothing can provide that biting, aromatic intensity that you get from Seville oranges, which have the taste of orange and the ravaging sourness of lemons – but ordinary eating oranges combined with lime juice provide a glorious tangy and fragrant hit of their own.
Serves 6
3 Seville oranges or 1 eating orange and 2 limes
175g icing sugar
large pot (584ml) double cream
wafers, to serve (optional)