If you consider eating with friends and family a joyful, indulgent celebration chances are you love a good feast. And who better to carefully guide you through the daunting task of preparing that Feast than the domestic goddess herself Nigella Lawson. Written in the tradition of Nigella Bites and How to Eat, Feast is a cookbook for the sensualist that wants to eat very well, but also wants to spend time enjoying the company of their guests instead of struggling with the creation of the meal. What sets Lawson apart is not that she's a good cookbook writer, but a strong writer period. Similar to her other books, Nigella's Feast is presented as part personal memoir, part educational, and part recipe presentation. There is a nice blend of occasions including the obvious (Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, and Easter), a few culturally specific ones (Rosh Hashanah, Georgian Feast, and Venetian Feast), feasts for kids, for vegetarians, and an elegant cocktail party. Each chapter begins with an overview of that particular "Feast." Generally, there is a personal story and experience told, an overview of the cultural importance of the feast, and a description of foods that are associated with each occasion. Impressively, every recipe begins with a personal anecdote giving that impression Nigella didn't just throw it in the book, but is experienced with the recipe and has used it with success. Take her twist on the decadent Chocolate Guinness Cake for example: "I wanted to make a cream cheese frosting to echo the pale head that sits on top of a glass of stout. It's unconventional to add cream but it makes it frothier and lighter which I regard as aesthetically and gastronomically desirable." Who can argue? The cake is to die for. So next time you need to prepare a dinner party let the goddess be your guide, and remember: Keep the preparation simple, use easily available ingredients, and take time to enjoy your guests and your meal. Feast may not be the most advanced cookbook you will own, but if you want to create excellent food with relative ease in a short amount of time, you can not beat Nigella. --Rob Bracco
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. "Cooking has many functions, and only one of them is about feeding people," writes Lawson in a cookbook that makes the preparation of Thanksgiving, Christmas and other feasts seem so approachable and richly rewarding that it may coax even hardcore cynics or cowards to give roast turkey with all the trimmings a try. For starters, there is Lawson's star quality. "When we go into a kitchen, indeed when we even just think about going into a kitchen, we are both creating and responding to an idea we hold about ourselves, about what kind of person we wish to be." The person that Lawson has demonstrated a wish to be while cooking on her TV show Nigella Bites and in her cookbooks (How to Be a Domestic Goddess, etc.) is a woman in full, alive in body and mind.Lawson has always playfully gloried in the erotic possibilities of cooking. She has always proclaimed herself an eater rather than a chef, but what she is really is a marvelous, funny food writer for our pressured times. She knows exactly how to balance her relish of the earthy with just the right twist of smarty-pants, Oxford-inflected wit. Explaining, for example, why she now chooses to bake stuffing in a terrine, she hastens to note that while she is "perfectly happy with my arm up a goose as I ram it with compacted sauerkraut, or whatever the occasion demands, I find turkey-wrangling just one psycho-step too far. The bird is too heavy, the cavity too small, and the job is just too tragi-comic to be managed alone and after all that Christmas wrapping, too." Lawson knows how to make her readers fall in love (or at least in lust) with her.Readers will come away from this book with a sense of what she thinks is worth loving. Along with her recipes for Christmas pudding or her "amplification" of her mother's green beans (involving "vicious amounts of lemon"), Lawson teaches what is primal and timeless about feasting. "I am not someone who believes that life is sacred, but I know it is very precious," she writes in a final section about funeral feasts that describes Mormon potatoes and Jewish eggs, comfort food to remind the bereaved "that life goes on, that living is important." She ends the book with Rosemary Remembrance Cake in honor of her grandmother Rosemary (and anybody else who happens to have read Shakespeare and knows that rosemary is for remembrance). Lawson shows that creating a feast doesn't just nourish the body and the mind—it creates an even more interesting self that also has a heart, whose function is remembering. 150 color photos. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
New York Times
"Ms. Lawson brings to life the sensual aspects of cooking, helping you understand . . . the pleasure of the journey."
People
"Vivid and fresh -- we would drive on the left side of the road to get to her molten-chocolate baby cakes."
The Wine News
"The genius on display here is the exotic combination of irony, joie de vivre, curiosity and nurturing."
Book Description
Nigella Lawson, Gourmet magazine's "It Girl," New York Times "Dining In" columnist, and bestselling cookbook author, is celebrating life -- and you're invited. Feast, Nigella's most festive book yet, offers savory, spicy, and delicious recipes for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukah, Eid, New Year's, Passover, Easter gatherings, and any time you want to celebrate food and life. This book is filled with festive recipes, and in it, Nigella offers tips, tricks, and shortcuts that will ensure you dine with ease, style, and fun. Feast also includes some surprising gems, like Nigella's Chocolate Cake Hall of Fame, and her best cheeseburger. And like her other cookbooks, Feast is a cookbook that will be treasured all year long.
About the Author
Nigella Lawson's column in the New York Times "Dining In" section appears every other week. She is the author of How to Eat, How to Be a Domestic Goddess (for which she won the British Author of the Year Award), Nigella Bites, and Forever Summer, and she appears regularly on the Today show. She lives in London with her two children.
Excerpted from Feast : Food to Celebrate Life by Nigella Lawson. Copyright © 2004. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chocolate Raspberry Heart For the cake:
3/4 cup milk
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
3 large eggs
1 cup granulated sugar
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons best unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 shallow 9-inch heart-shaped pans for the filling:
1 cup fresh raspberries
½ cup heavy cream for the icing:
¾ cup heavy cream
5 ½ ounces bittersweet chocolate, minimum 70% cocoa
1 tablespoon corn syrup
1 cup fresh raspberries Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease and line two 9-inch heart-shaped cake pans. Pour the milk into a small pan, add the butter, and heat over medium heat until the butter melts. Or you can just put the milk and butter in a glass measuring cup and melt the butter in the microwave. When hot, add the vanilla. Whisk the eggs and sugar until thick, light colored, and frothy. I use the paddle attachment of the KitchenAid for this. Meanwhile, mix together the flour, cocoa, and baking soda in a bowl. Still beating the eggs and sugar, add the vanilla-flavored milk. When incorporated, slowly fold in the flour mixture, either using the paddle attachment on low speed or by hand with a spatula. You will need a final scrape-down and fold with a rubber spatula in any event. Divide the batter between the two pans and bake for about 20 minutes. Remove to wire racks and let cool in the pans for about 10 minutes before turning the cakes out, and then turning them back up on the wire racks, out of the pans, the right way up. Leave the cakes to cool before icing; you can make them in advance, but they are sticky so you must wrap them in parchment paper before wrapping them in aluminum foil. To fill the heart, whip the cream until thick but not stiff. Add the raspberries and crush with a fork, but not too finely. The cream should turn wonderfully pink, in a rose-and-white mottled fashion. Sandwich the hearts with the raspberry cream. To ice, put the cream, chocolate cut into small pieces, and syrup in a pan over low to medium heat and when the chocolate seems to have all but melted into the warm cream, take off the heat and start whisking until you have a smooth, glossy mixture. Pour, and then spread -- preferably with a palette knife -- over the top of the cake to the edges of the heart (not worrying too much about drips). Take out your cup of raspberries and just about 1 inch, or maybe slightly less in from the edges of the heart, start studding the chocolate topping with the raspberries (hole sides down) or however, indeed, you like.
Feast: Food to Celebrate Life FROM OUR EDITORS
By now, every good foodie knows about Nigella Lawson, domestic goddess, cookbook author, Gourmet "It Girl", and New York Times "Dining In" columnist. The winner of the British Author of the Year Award has a knack for communicating kitchen savvy in an unpretentious yet stylish way. Feast is a year-round holiday bounty, offering savory recipes for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Eid, New Year's, Passover, Easter, and other seasonal gatherings. As usual, the author of Nigella Bites dishes out variety and surprises. If the Chocolate Raspberry Heart doesn't grab you, Nigella's Favorite Cheeseburger surely will.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
The domestic goddess dishes up her favorite foods for entertaining year-round with family and friends.
Nigella Lawson, Gourmet magazine's "It Girl," New York Times "Dining In" columnist, and bestselling cookbook author, is celebrating life — and you're invited. Feast, Nigella's most festive book yet, offers savory, spicy, and delicious recipes for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukah, Eid, New Year's, Passover, Easter gatherings, and any time you want to celebrate food and life. This book is filled with festive recipes, and in it, Nigella offers tips, tricks, and shortcuts that will ensure you dine with ease, style, and fun. Feast also includes some surprising gems, like Nigella's Chocolate Cake Hall of Fame, her best cheeseburger, and even a whole section entitled "Fast," full of food to create after you have overindulged. And like her other cookbooks, Feast is a cookbook that will be treasured all year long.
Nigella Lawson's column in the New York Times "Dining In" section appears every other week. She is the author of How to Eat, How to Be a Domestic Goddess (for which she won the British Author of the Year Award), Nigella Bites, and Forever Summer, and she appears regularly on the Today show. She lives in London with her two children.
FROM THE CRITICS
Korby Cummer - The New York Times
Lawson is always full of good sense, but she strikes me as exceptionally sensible in her chapter on cooking for children.
Wine News
The genius on display here is the exotic combination of irony, joie de vivre, curiosity and nurturing.
Publishers Weekly
"Cooking has many functions, and only one of them is about feeding people," writes Lawson in a cookbook that makes the preparation of Thanksgiving, Christmas and other feasts seem so approachable and richly rewarding that it may coax even hardcore cynics or cowards to give roast turkey with all the trimmings a try. For starters, there is Lawson's star quality. "When we go into a kitchen, indeed when we even just think about going into a kitchen, we are both creating and responding to an idea we hold about ourselves, about what kind of person we wish to be." The person that Lawson has demonstrated a wish to be while cooking on her TV show Nigella Bites and in her cookbooks (How to Be a Domestic Goddess, etc.) is a woman in full, alive in body and mind. Lawson has always playfully gloried in the erotic possibilities of cooking. She has always proclaimed herself an eater rather than a chef, but what she is really is a marvelous, funny food writer for our pressured times. She knows exactly how to balance her relish of the earthy with just the right twist of smarty-pants, Oxford-inflected wit. Explaining, for example, why she now chooses to bake stuffing in a terrine, she hastens to note that while she is "perfectly happy with my arm up a goose as I ram it with compacted sauerkraut, or whatever the occasion demands, I find turkey-wrangling just one psycho-step too far. The bird is too heavy, the cavity too small, and the job is just too tragi-comic to be managed alone and after all that Christmas wrapping, too." Lawson knows how to make her readers fall in love (or at least in lust) with her. Readers will come away from this book with a sense of what she thinks is worth loving. Along with her recipes for Christmas pudding or her "amplification" of her mother's green beans (involving "vicious amounts of lemon"), Lawson teaches what is primal and timeless about feasting. "I am not someone who believes that life is sacred, but I know it is very precious," she writes in a final section about funeral feasts that describes Mormon potatoes and Jewish eggs, comfort food to remind the bereaved "that life goes on, that living is important." She ends the book with Rosemary Remembrance Cake in honor of her grandmother Rosemary (and anybody else who happens to have read Shakespeare and knows that rosemary is for remembrance). Lawson shows that creating a feast doesn't just nourish the body and the mind-it creates an even more interesting self that also has a heart, whose function is remembering. 150 color photos. Author tour. (Nov.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Art & Photography
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