Feast: Food to Celebrate Life (Hardcover)

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. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

"[Nigella’s] fifth book is the best since her first. As [did] How to Eat this book appeals to both the cook and the reader. Nigella’s feasts range from a funeral reception to a Passover seder always using tempting yet simple dishes."
—the cookbook store

"Impressive battle plans for grand dinners and family celebrations."
—Maclean’s

"Britain’s resident sultry queen of the kitchen."
—Flare

"Britain’s finger-licking domestic goddess has morphed into a holiday deity with her latest cookbook, emphasizing that feasts for friends and family don’t have to be daunting."
—The Chronicle Herald (Halifax) [Canadian Press]

"She’s funny and sexy, her food looks amazing and her blasé manner convinces even the most determined of kitchen loathers that cooking isn’t drudgery but something to be enjoyed. . . . The writing is witty, crisp and casual. . . .The photography is gorgeous in its simplicity and homeyness."
—The Chronicle Herald (Halifax)

"A 472-page cookbook that features sumptuous recipes that honour the small everyday pleasures of life, as well as customary rites of passage."
—The Leader Post (Regina)

"Like her other books, [Feast] is full of recipes both casual and fanciful, stunning photography and her endearing style of writing that’ll keep you happily reading for hours and inspire confidence in even the clumsiest of cooks."
—The Hamilton Spectator

"Feast is simply the cream of the crop of holiday cookbooks."
—Metro (Toronto)

"This book is as luscious and extravagant as the diva herself."
—National Post

"It’s beauty and the feast. . . . Lawson’s recipes are straightforward, never pretentious and easy to follow. . . . What’s neat about her books is her smart, sassy presence, guiding you through the cooking process."
—The Standard (St. Catharines)

"A gem of a thick, fat book brimming with Nigella-isms."
—The Toronto Sun

"A great sense of place and occasion in a recipe book... Nigella is a very talented and evocative food writer."
—Time Out (UK)

"Nigella has become the idealised home maker de nos jours, the domestic cook we would all like to aspire to be, Mrs Beaton cum Constance Spry cum Jane Grigson cum Caroline Conran. Her recipes are rich and motherly and sustaining and sexy, just as she is. The finished dishes gleam up from the photographs, not artful, glossy and precise as if they had been made by a team of home economists and food stylists, but artless, homely and natural, as they would appear in our own kitchens…. Feast, like so much of Lawson’s work, is a voluptuous and delicious piece of food writing…. This is the kind of food we can dream of cooking."
—The Guardian (UK)

Praise for How to Eat:
“Her prose is as nourishing as her recipes and makes How to Eat a book that should please mere readers as well as serious cooks and happy omnivores.”
—Salman Rushdie