Cook, Eat, Repeat: Ingredients, Recipes, and Stories

It is a book for those of us who love reading and cooking, and here Nigella gives us plenty of reasons to indulge and lose ourselves in both. There are recipes yes, in the classical sense, with lists of ingredients and methods, but there is more. There are stories too, more like essays, somehow intimate, feeling like we've just picked up the phone to ask Nigella what we can cook for dinner. There are hints of recipes, alternatives and advice. I discovered more recipes in these conversations than I would have done just by looking for the holy triptych of ingredients list-method-photo. This is the beauty of her book. Beyond the need for being exact, how many of this or that, diced or sliced, how many people would it serve...it lies a world of possibilities that can't be quantified. I find this truly inspiring. So buy the book for the stories, for the introspections and the answers, for the art of conversation about food, and for enjoying 300 pages of outstanding writing.

I love Nigella’s books and her writing and I feel very sad to be writing this review. However, I feel disappointed and slightly cheated by this one! The recipes are difficult to pick out from the endless pages of back stories and aren’t organised in any sort of logical way. I have all Nigella’s books and usually love reading the background stories and information at the start of each recipe but this one is extreme! Usually I would read from cover to cover before even making anything but I just don’t have the energy or patience to tackle this one yet and it has gone straight onto the shelf- which is such a shame.

The print/font is smaller compared to my other cookbooks. I found that off putting as I can usually read my cookbooks without having to don reading glasses. I enjoyed reading the back stories of the recipes and there are quite a few "funky" dishes. I don't know that I will actually make many of the recipes, but it's a fun read if you are a fan of Nigella.

Nigella Lawson's cookbooks long ago earned the special designation of "pre-order this book as soon as Amazon permits it." I've worn out the spine on some of her cookbooks, several of which fall open to recipes that I've made dozens of times. She has reliable instructions, simple (but not over-simple) recipes that are do-able on a weeknight, and a marvelous bedside manner. Needless to say, I was excited about Cook, Eat, Repeat. ...and I still am, though this cookbook is _different_. Lawson wrote this cookbook in the throes of the lockdown, when clearly she was cooking primarily for herself. Much of our globally-shared mood comes through, primarily the upbeat, "Well, we shall carry on as best we can!" optimism that cheers me up so much. But she has thoughtful food essays too, including one that is an embrace of "pleasures" over "guilty pleasures," because what's the point of feeling guilty about the things you enjoy and are going to do? There's a sense of comfort-food indulgence in these recipes (because obviously all of us have been needing that), such as her regular family favorites -- the lasagna she always makes for family, for instance. But it isn't merely a difference of "mood," because frankly I like her so much that I'd be happy to hear Lawson share her opinion on an IKEA instruction manual. The book's organization is different, too, and I'm a little less keen on that. Several of Lawson's cookbooks eschew the traditional presentation of appetizers / soups / entrees / desserts, etc.; if you're familiar with her cookbooks you already know that. This one has themes based on ingredient (rhubarb or anchovy) or event (Christmas comforts, or Much Depends on Dinner). That makes it hard to figure out where to find a particular chicken recipe that had sounded interesting. Expect to use the index a lot, if you don't adopt my habit of sticking tiny Post-Its on anything that sounds appealing; the latter has the effect of waving tiny flags of encouragement to (in an Alice in Wonderland voice) "Eat me!" However, many of the recipes are not given in the ordinary guise of a list of ingredients followed by numbered instructions. Lawson includes them in a long foodie essay, kind of the "talkin' blues" approach to cookery: "Well you can roast it with a little basil, should you have any on hand, or thyme if you don't." Which makes me think of sitting next to my Aunt Libby and asking her, say, "What else can I do with rhubarb beyond pie?" and listening to my aunt ramble for 10 minutes with inspiring, "Well, you could do THIS and add THAT and...." Which is wonderful, in its way, except for the inability to find those instructions ever again. It might have been solved with a layout change, wherein the Recipe Name appeared in another color or as a sidebar or something. But enough whining, because this is a great collection...