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When I last spoke to Nigella Lawson on a sunny morning in February 2012, her children had just left for school and she was enjoying the relative quiet of the Chelsea home she shared with her then husband Charles Saatchi. Few outside her most intimate circle knew that her life was becoming increasingly isolated, unhappy and fraught with “intimate terrorism” at the hands of the man she had once adored but now feared.

Fast forward two years and life looks quite different for the 54-year-old, as she embarks on the next stage of her extraordinary, yet far from perfect, life. Now residing in a welcoming rented house in West London, Lawson is starting to take pleasure from life again. Not a week after her two personal assistants were cleared of defrauding her and Saatchi out of 685,000 (AU$1.24 million) and the details of her marriage and occasional drug use were smeared on front pages across the globe, she was taking a turkey out of the oven and serving up a feast for family and friends on Christmas Day.

“In a way, wanting to feed people is just in your character and you either have it or you don’t,” she told MiNDFOOD. “I don’t know that cooking is just about nurturing, though. I think it’s about trying to find some order in the universe as well.”

TROUBLED LOVENurturing the men in her life through food has not been nearly as successful as Lawson might have hoped. Her first husband, John Diamond, suffered from throat cancer for four years and died aged 47 in 2001. And while she had once proclaimed about her never-dull husband, “I love a room with John in it,” Diamond was angry and difficult during the years he was sick – unsurprising, given that the journalist and commentator made a living with his voice; with his tongue cut out, he could neither speak nor eat. So instead of being able to care for Diamond in the manner she loved best – with comfort food – Lawson spent much of that time feeling guilty about the delicious smells wafting upstairs as she prepared meals for herself and her children.

Yet, Lawson says Diamond was like Saatchi, in that he didn’t much care for the food she liked to cook – a bizarre coincidence given the legions of fans who relish replicating her simple but scrumptious recipes in their own kitchens. “He says there is nothing I could cook that could compare favourably with Weetabix,” she once famously said.

Having to restrain herself from the very indulgence that gives her the most pleasure is just one example of the adjustments she had to make upon moving from her comfortable, chaotic home into Saatchi’s grand, museum-like London house within a year of John’s death. The house was carefully presented – expensive artwork, fake flowers, immaculate furnishings – but the frequent gatherings Lawson enjoyed in her old house soon dwindled and friends no longer felt comfortable dropping by.

Despite a brief social resurgence when the family relocated to the exclusive London suburb of Chelsea, social get-togethers were commonly hosted in restaurants rather than the family home. Still, the move gave Lawson the chance to be more like herself again and the house was soon filled with the fresh flowers she loved.

NIGELLA’S QUIPS“Sometimes … we don’t want to feel like a post-modern, post-feminist, overstretched woman but, rather, a domestic goddess, trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in our languorous wake.”

“Cake baking has to be, however innocently, one of the great culinary scams: it implies effort, it implies domestic prowess; but believe me, it’s easy.”

“You could probably get through life without knowing how to roast a chicken, but the question is, would you want to?”

“I don’t believe you can ever really cook unless you love eating.”

“Sometimes it’s good just to be seduced by the particular cheeses spread out in front of you on a cheese counter.”

“… cooking, we know, has a way of cutting through things, and to things, which have nothing to do with the kitchen. This is why it matters.”

“I put the kitch into kitchen.”

“… That Great Cocktail Cabinet in the Sky …”

NIGELLA BITES BACKAfter a harrowing year of hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons, Nigella Lawson is back on her feet and as vivacious as ever. MiNDFOOD finds out what’s in store for everyone’s favourite domestic goddess.Words by Joanna Tovia Photography by Chris Nicholls

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CHAPTER ONE | N IGE L L A L AWSON

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CHAPTER ONE | N IGE L L A L AWSON

Now, the daily cooking updates and witty banter that ceased for months have quietly resumed as if nothing happened. Yet, there are signs Lawson’s perspective has been forever altered after the dramatic events of the past year.

Still, Lawson is the first to admit she is no innocent, and has stated that she would probably have engaged in gossip had she heard similar reports about someone else – from linking up with Saatchi shortly after Diamond’s death, to the more recent titbits about her rocky marriage, potential domestic violence, drug use and other juicy details that have been feeding the ever-hungry rumour mill.

“We all gossip. I don’t take a particularly lofty view. [But] perhaps having a layer of skin removed, I’m also more aware of other people’s misfortunes,” she said in an interview on The Michael McIntyre Chat Show on BBC One.

Instead of adding fuel to the fire by sharing unsavoury tales about Saatchi, Lawson has opted to take the higher ground. “I could say things and they would be indiscreet but I don’t want to,” she said. Lawson has also chosen not to read any of what is being written about her to avoid being “contaminated” by it. “I’ve stopped reading papers, which I find difficult because I was a journalist [for] so long and I’m a bit of a print fanatic.

“I’m not an innocent; I understand how it works. I just don’t involve myself. I don’t speak and I don’t comment.” Instead, Lawson has resumed her love of the written word in the form of books. Despite not having any bookshelves in her rented house, Lawson says she can’t stop herself from acquiring new books, and they lie stacked around her bedroom in glorious disarray – a far cry from the fastidiously tidy home Saatchi liked to live in.

NURTURING THE MINDHaving studied medieval and modern languages at the University of Oxford, Lawson has a love of the written word and can now indulge in it to her heart’s content. As she told British Vogue’s editor-at-large and close friend Fiona Golfar, she’s reading and re-reading Philip Roth, revisiting Dante and Petrarch in Italian, and has just finished a new translation of Proust.

Saatchi, who is said to have liked Lawson to sit beside him during dinner parties so he could whisper in her ear, also urged her to sit with him while he watched endless hours of TV. The anxious-to-please domestic goddess once told Golfar wistfully that she felt like she had spent her 40s in front of a television screen.

“I’m ready to start thinking,” Lawson says. “I love what I do but there are other parts of my brain that I haven’t flexed in a professional way. I do sometimes think that I’ve let the more analytical part of my brain slump slightly. I mean, I do like writing about food but there is so much that interests me.”

The self-confessed lover of the finer things in life – particularly luxury linen, face cream and, of course, food – is also starting to put the strain of the past year behind her and find life pleasurable again with impromptu dinner parties, lots of chocolate and the sense of promise that accompanies a new beginning.

She and her children Cosima, 20, and Bruno, 18, are about to move into a new house after an extensive search during which she laughingly admits to scanning other people’s kitchen shelves for copies of her own cookbooks.

Perhaps this will be the house that finally allows her to live life just how she likes it.

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Julia ChildCredited with bringing French cuisine to the American public, the late Julia Child was a chef, author and TV personality. Her seminal text Mastering the Art of French Cooking was followed by nearly 20 other titles. In 1963, her first television show, The French Chef, debuted.

Alice WatersWidely regarded as the inventor of “California cuisine”, Alice Waters is the proprietor of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. Established in 1971, the restaurant is applauded for its menu focused on organic, locally grown ingredients – Waters is still one of the world’s most visible advocates of sustainable produce.

Clare SmythNorthern Irish chef Clare Smyth is chef patron at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, and the first British female chef to hold three Michelin stars. She is also a Member of the Order of the British Empire and supports charities such as Action Against Hunger and Who’s Cooking Dinner.

MiNDFOOD.COM Go online to listen to an interview with Nigella

Lawson on MiNDFOOD Radio. KEYWORDS: NIGELLA, LAWSON