`I am not a chef," writes Nigella Lawson in the preface to her first cookery book, How to Eat. "I am not even a trained or professional cook. My qualification is an eater." But what lifts How to Eat above the morass of cookery books that swamp publishers' catalogues at this time of year, is that she is a wonderful writer, a columnist who is used to writing what she believes and what she thinks, in a style that is as spontaneous as it is clear and owes nothing to anyone who has gone before.
Most cookery books fall into one of two categories, the inspirational, or the instructional - where it's left to glossy photographs to get the gastric juices flowing.
The great achievement of How to Eat is that it does both. Yet in 524 pages encompassing 350 recipes there is not a single photograph of any of them. Instead Nigella Lawson conjured up images of the finished product with words.
Take this description of a pudding I would not normally even consider. "I love custard tart. I love its barely-vanilla-scented, nutmeggy softness, the silky texture of that buttermilk-coloured eggy cream, solidified just enough to be carved into trembling wedges on the plate." Reading it my feet were twitching to get down to the kitchen. Once at the work-surface or stove the chatty precision of her instructions is as spot-on practical as the most novice cook could wish for, while her seamless flow of anecdotes and honesty (she has never made marmalade and gravy usually defeats her) ensures that even old hands will find echoes of our blind spots, and chortle in recognition as we discover how to avoid them.
Nor does she believe that food is just about cooking (hence the title). The pleasures of the delicatessen and patisserie are not forgotten, as the chapter on weekend lunches demonstrates admirably, while her analysis, dissection and time-tabling of the traditional Sunday lunch is simply masterly.
We meet at her house one afternoon while Bruno, aged two, is having his afternoon rest. The kitchen table still bears the remains of lunch. The fridge is full of Christmas left-overs. Yesterday she did a photo-shoot, complete with velvet frock and over-tired kids. (Bruno two, Cosima four). Two months early, but that's showbiz.
She knows it's still seen as somehow odd that a political and literary journalist and social commentator should want to write about food, as she has now for 15 years, first as a restaurant critic on the weekly political magazine the Spectator, then with a monthly cookery column on Vogue. She sees no problem with her "split life".
"It's a great luxury if your working life can reflect your real life. Just because people are interested in food, why on Earth should that mean you don't have an interest in reading, or what the state of education is in the country? We all know that we do have that range of interests. The idea that you have to occupy such a narrow sphere, is ridiculous. I think it is actually more honest to write about things you're interested in."
Nigella Lawson has been interested in food, "particularly the kitchen bit" since she was a child. "The whole household was interested. My family, being Jewish, talked about food in a way that now everyone does. It was only when I started visiting friends house that I first came across the idea that it was rude to talk about food." Her mother was obviously a very good cook. "And she was very good with child labour. So we helped, with mayonnaise, Bearnaise, white sauce." Things that needed attention and stirring. "Funnily enough for me those were very hard for me to write about because I'd never thought about measuring anything."
Starting with just a few things is still the best way to learn, she believes. "People still seem to think that there are tricks to things. That's not really what cooking is." It's the result of the "chef industry" where the idea of "the bravura of performance" seems to have overtaken all other considerations, forgetting that restaurant cooking and home cooking are completely different.
"People think learning to cook is about mastery. It's not. It's about familiarity, which is a very, very different thing and I think at the beginning people should stick to a few things, and fiddle about with them, get used to it rather than hop from one recipe to another. One doesn't even want a huge repertoire anyway." Constantly feeling that she has to extend her range is one of the things she finds difficult. "There are some things that I want to do again and again. Though that side is satisfied by cooking for the children."
The section on food for babies and small children is worth the cost of the book on its own.
Judge for this year's Booker prize, resident reviewer on Channel 4's Booked, regular contributor to Nigel Slater's food programme, not to mention print journalist - Nigella Lawson would appear to have a lifestyle as remote from the rest of us as royalty. Not true, she says. She's the same as every other mother with young children. And, working from home, even lunch must be bought and cooked.
"I know everyone thinks I go around in turquoise organza and a tiara. It just shows to me how ensnared by authority the British are. The reason they think that is because my father was in the government. Now my father is second or third generation Latvian immigrant. But automatically people think he's a nob. It's very strange."
Her father is the former British chancellor of the exchequer Nigel Lawson - and being called Nigella didn't, of course, help, she admits. ("My mother, before she died said `Sorry, darling, if I'd known daddy was going to be famous I wouldn't have done it'.")
Even now, in her 30s, she continues to be dogged by the fame of those around her. First it was daddy, then brother Dominic (editor of the Sunday Telegraph) finally her husband, media pundit John Diamond. Until 18 months ago he had remained relatively unknown. Then he was diagnosed with cancer of the mouth and tongue and his account of the illness, published this summer, became a best-seller. He is slowly learning to talk again, but cannot eat, and is fed, as Nigella describes it "through a plug in his stomach".
On a day-to-day level, she says, it is very strange not to have that sharing of food. "It's very difficult, a terrible thing to have gone. I tend to eat with the children now, because I think it's very important for them to have as much normality as possible."
Meanwhile, cooking itself, she says, is wonderful therapy. "I do think that doing something practical is quite calming. Not when you're doing something frightening and there are lots of people hanging about, but various ordinary kitchen tasks. I like the rhythm of it." She also enjoys cooking for herself - as is sadly regularly the case now - and the book has a very good section on treats for one or two.
How to Eat has its share of fashionable ingredients - mascarpone, truffle oil and the rest. But Nigella Lawson insists that she's not a foodie. "Being a foodie is about status and about being fashionable. I'm not interested in being fashionable." It's one of the reasons the recipes in How to Eat are not predominately Italian, although this is what she mainly cooks at home, when she's not trying to lose weight with Japanese and Thai-inspired recipes. (The low fat section not only has recipes even a thinny might want to cook, but practical advice on how to eat less.)
Inevitably there is less entertaining now in the Lawson/Diamond household than there used to be. But she tries to keep up Saturday lunches with friends and their children. It's hard for John, she says, "But he's got to find a way of living so that, while he knows he is excluded - in that he knows he can't eat - he's not excluded from the sense of what's going on. Also it's very important for the children to know that food is something that's shared." They may have their own rooms and their own toys, but food is different. "No one owns food. Food is always to be shared."
Nigella Lawson was half-way through How to Eat when her husband was diagnosed with cancer. "If the title hadn't been John's I couldn't have continued."
From quince syllabub to foolproof Yorkshire pudding, from the best non-stick frying pan to biscuits that will still be delicious no matter how many times little hands have rolled them out, anyone who reads it will be grateful that she did.