BRITISH-Bangladeshi home cook turned 2015 Great British Bake Off winner, recipe writer and telly presenter Nadiya Hussain is now basically a national treasure.
She’s someone we turn to whether in need of a curry, a tea-time cake, or a stack of sugary confectionery. We caught up with her to talk about some of her most memorable food moments – and, surprisingly, Bake Off didn’t make the cut...
Her earliest food memory is...
“So we went to Sunday market and I couldn’t understand why dad wanted to get a chainsaw - we didn’t have bushes, anyway, didn’t think anything of it because my dad’s a bit mad anyway, so we bought a chainsaw. Then, the following weekend, he called my mum and said, ‘Clear the dining table’, and then he went to the butchers down the road.
“We open the door, look down and he’s got an entire dead sheep on his back. He whacks it on the dining table and says, ‘Who wants to learn how to butcher a sheep?’ and that’s what he did.
“Then he cooked the whole thing. He’d dug a hole outside, bought a pot and he cooked the whole sheep and my extended family all came over and ate with us, it was amazing – I was about seven years old.
“Oh my god, it was delicious, just imagine a sheep curry that had been cooking for seven hours on a tepid fire, just constant, mum had to cook the rice, it was amazing.”
Her worst food disaster was...
“I made a liquid chocolate cake once but I made it in a loose bottomed tin, but I didn’t seal the tin properly and all the cake came down and outside the tin into the bottom of the oven.
“The entire cake was baked at the bottom of the oven, and I looked in the tin and was like, ‘Where on earth has the cake gone?’ And then I saw it, and my husband was scraping it with spatulas, he was like, ‘We can eat this right?’ I told him ‘No!’ He ate it anyway, chicken fat from the bottom of the oven and all! Salty and sweet...”
Her culinary highlight has to be...
“Baking a 90th birthday cake for the Queen!”
Nadiya’s Family Favourites by Nadiya Hussain, photography by Chris Terry, is published by Michael Joseph, priced £20.
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