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I find it hard to fathom, but How To Be A Domestic Goddess is a quarter of a century old this week! That’s the thing about the passage of time: it feels as if it came out both yesterday and also a lifetime ago – which of course, it was. I got the idea for it as I was finishing How To Eat, even though when I’d started it I was convinced it would be a one-off, a brief detour from my day job as a journalist. I’d always felt that you were either a cook or a baker, and I saw myself very much as a cook, but I knew I had to tackle some rudimentary baking in How To Eat, and it changed my mind completely. I feel it also changed my sense of self, in an important way. We define and limit ourselves too readily in life, and I’d absorbed the idea that baking required some mysterious talent or natural instinct but when I realised that just wasn’t true, and that you could be clumsy, impatient and skill-free and yet still be able to bake, I felt transformed. And like all converts, I was full of joyous zeal, intent on bringing the glad tidings to others who also had restricted themselves by saying “I’m not the sort of person who can do that”.
It's not just that this enlarged sense of possibilities added so much to my life, but I got so much comfort from baking. It was not an easy time in my life – when HTBADG came out, my husband had terminal cancer and my children were six and four – and even though I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I found baking therapeutic, it provided both a quiet focus and a warm bustle that felt invaluably normal and nourishing. I hasten to add, I mean in a soul-sense: I’m not making a nutritional case for sugar here! Indeed, I don’t even have a particularly sweet tooth, and yet baking brings me enduring joy.
Even 25 years on, I’m filled with the wonderment that baking brings. As I wrote at the time, baking is a curious mixture of chemistry and poetry: when we cook a stew, say, it’s easy to understand how that meat, those vegetables become the meal we eat; it always feels extraordinary that you just beat butter, sugar, eggs and flour and it becomes a cake. Of course, all cooking is a transformational act, but baking brings that home with magical intensity. And I think that’s a deep part of its appeal. We humans are drawn to stories of transformation, after all.
But what’s hard to explain now is just how outlandish a proposition How To Be A Domestic Goddess was a quarter of a century ago. When I mentioned the idea to my then editor, she was, initially, doubtful in the extreme. “But no one bakes any more” she told me. And it’s true: in the UK, at any rate, baking was seen as the province of some notional rural granny, an uncool throwback that had nothing to do with The Way We Live Now. I’m not saying that people didn’t bake cakes ever. Even when I considered myself a non-baker, I’d make a birthday cake or the occasional cheesecake and so on. But the idea of a baking book? It seemed bafflingly old-fashioned. I suppose I wanted to send up that feeling somehow in my title or, rather, I expressed my enthusiasm for baking by instinctively resorting to camp, as I evoked the feeling of being a domestic goddess “trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in our languorous wake”. The kitsch photos that were printed on that first edition’s endpapers did emphasise, I like to think, that I wasn’t seriously suggesting we should submit ourselves to a life of service and shackle ourselves to our stoves. But just in case, I made this clear from the off, writing in my preface that “I neither want to confine you to kitchen quarters nor even suggest it might be desirable.” I like pottering about the kitchen. Many of us do, both men and women alike. Of course now, 25 years on, no one would think to scorn baking as a retrograde activity. I feel odd even bringing it up! Anyway, I’ve gone on for long enough.
What really brought home how many years have passed since HTBADG was published was seeing these pictures taken at the time, one in which I was relatively glammed up for the launch party, and one rather less so with a steamed syrup sponge. At the time, I thought I was old; from my vantage point now, I look like a child! I wasn’t: in fact, I was 40 – but as with so much in life, it’s a matter of perspective.
I have two things to tell you before I leave you in peace. One is that I am marking the book’s 25th birthday by bringing another five recipes from it to nigella.com, namely Cheese Blintzes, which essentially are pancakes wrapped around a soft, cheesecake-like filling, and as heavenly as that sounds; Danish Pastries, which are unexpectedly easy to make; this stoutly bulging Double Apple Pie; the plain but pleasurable cake-shortbread hybrid from Brittany, Gâteau Breton; and the small, savoury Cheese, Onion and Potato Pies.
Finally, I have a competition to tell you about! My publishers' food website, The Happy Foodie, has put out a call on their Instagram account asking to see your best-loved bakes from the book. To enter, post a photo of what you’ve made to your Instagram grid and make sure to tag @thehappyfoodie and use the hashtag #DomesticGoddess25. Please note that you must have a public Instagram account to enter, as we will not be able to see tags from a private account. The competition is open now - though limited to UK residents over 18 only - and closes on 26th October 2025. I’ll be picking my five favourite entries, and each winner will receive a personalised signed copy of a book of mine, of their choice. Winners will be announced on the 7th November. Happy Baking!
