Trusted British chef recipes, tested at home
Nigella Lawson’s sweet potato tacos are warm corn tortillas filled with spiced roasted sweet potato wedges, shredded lettuce and gherkins, a creamy avocado-coriander sauce and a fresh tomato-and-pear relish. It serves 3 to 4, from her book At My Table. She’s firmly in the soft-shell camp: given the choice between a crisp, curled-up taco-boat and …
Nigella Lawson’s sticky toffee pudding is a deep, dark date sponge glazed and served with a rich muscovado toffee sauce. It makes 9 generous slabs, from her book At My Table. She calls it the glory of a sticky toffee pudding, and says her version is deeper and darker than the original: still sweet, but …
Nigella Lawson’s roast duck with orange, soy and ginger is a two-stage duck, steam-roasted then roasted hot, served with an aromatic orange, soy and ginger broth-gravy. It serves 4 to 6, from her book At My Table. She developed it to improve on her old How to Eat method, which involved poaching the ducks in …
Nigella Lawson’s rose and pepper pavlova is a marshmallow-bellied meringue subtly spiced with black pepper and rosewater, topped with whipped cream, passionfruit-macerated strawberries and their juice. It serves 8 to 12, from her book At My Table. The flavours sound bold but taste delicate. The idea came from her maternal grandfather, who ate strawberries with …
Nigella Lawson’s red cabbage with cranberries is a long-braised, spiced red cabbage cooked with red onion, apple juice, cinnamon, cloves and a double hit of cranberries. It serves 8 to 10, from her book At My Table. She describes the sweetness of the braised cabbage as perfectly punctuated by the cheek-squeaky sharpness of the cranberries. …
Nigella Lawson’s roast red chicory is quartered red chicory roasted with olive oil, dry white vermouth and thyme until charred, wilted and mellowed. It serves 3 to 4, from her book At My Table. She’s firmly of the “bitter-is-better” school and says barely a week goes by without her cooking it, often just to let …
Nigella Lawson’s golden garlic mayonnaise is a quick, saffron-tinted, garlicky mayonnaise made in one minute with a stick blender. It makes about 250ml, from her book At My Table. She grew up making proper mayonnaise by hand under her mother’s strict instructions, and long felt doing it any other way was sacrilegious. Then she found …
Nigella Lawson’s forgotten cookies are a cross between a meringue and a cookie, flavoured with cardamom and studded with chocolate chips and pistachios. The batch makes 12 to 14, from her book At My Table. A friend described them as tasting like a cookie within a cookie, and at home they’re known as “Merookies”, immensely …
Nigella Lawson’s chicken barley is a thick, creamy one-pot pottage of chicken thighs, pearl barley and root vegetables simmered in mustardy stock. It serves 4 to 6, from her book At My Table. She describes it as somewhere cosily between a stew and a slightly soupy, sticky risotto, offering instant comfort. It’s the sort of …
Nigella Lawson’s Catalan toast is charred rustic bread spread with a fuzzy mush of grated ripe tomato, garlic and olive oil. It makes about 6 pieces, from her book At My Table. She first came across it in a tapas bar in Barcelona “about 100 years ago”. Properly called pa amb tomàquet in Catalan, it’s …