Over curry and cake, two of the UK’s best-loved food writers talk about family, anxiety and learning to cope with life in the public eye
It is almost lunchtime when Nadiya Hussain arrives at my front door. She is bearing gifts. Among them, a tin of pastries she had fried that morning. “They’re my mum’s favourite,” she adds, handing me a tin of flaky, parcels, laminated like a cronut, each layer dusted with icing sugar and freckled with black onion seeds. We debate whether they are savoury or sweet. (The answer is both.) Two are wolfed instantly without the tea and clotted cream she insists they need and the rest are squirrelled away for tomorrow’s breakfast, but only because we are about to tuck into lunch.
Even before she reached the final of The Great British Bake Off, Nadiya was known to television viewers by a single name, like Nigella or Jamie. What fans of the programme like myself couldn’t know, as we took this quietly confident contestant to our hearts, was that between takes, she was running off to cry in the loo, shaking with nerves and unsure about how this could ever have happened to her.
It’s lovely to be a role model but I never claim to be a perfect version of myself
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