Lawson pays homage to Italy in new cookbook

British television celebrity and best-selling cookbook author Nigella Lawson recalls that when the other girls wanted to be French, she wanted to be Italian.

“As a teenager, what drew me was the combination of familial warmth and glamour that was somehow both earthy and chic,” Lawson said about Italy, where she lived between high school and college.

Her eighth cookbook, Nigellissima, focuses exclusively on 120 Italian-inspired recipes.

“Somehow by speaking Italian, I came into the person I am,” the 53-year-old, Oxford-educated cook added. London-based Lawson, who is appearing in the US cooking show The Taste, spoke about creating recipes and about how her most joyful moment in the kitchen is opening the fridge, seeing what is inside and trying to make something taste good from it, which she admits is “absolutely the antithesis of a cookery book”.

Asked how she would describe her take on Italian cuisine, she said: “I suppose what I bring to it is a slightly more contemporary, urban edge in the sense that I live a busy, modern city life, whereas so many Italian recipes come from a time when women were expected to spend a long time in the kitchen.

“I suppose I bring a kind of temporary impatience because it’s the way I live now.”