The Great British Bake Off is back.
And this time, it comes with a light sprinkling of Nigella’s seeds.
For dads outside the UK, this season of the quaint British baking show—or, possibly even this issue of a newsletter—might be your first experience of Nigella Lawson. So, by way of intro, here’s a quickie (pun absolutely intended). Nigella spent decades in the shadow of the men in her life: first her father, a Conservative MP and Chancellor of the Exchequer to Margaret Thatcher; then her first husband, the journalist John Diamond, who died in 2001; and finally Charles Saatchi—art collector, and, in my circles at least, better known as one of the Saatchis of ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi.
To succeed in life, Nigella fought to ensure her impact was felt as much outside the home as inside it. She traded a job in journalism to go out as a freelance writer and, after witnessing a friend melt down in the kitchen at a dinner party because she’d messed up a crème caramel, decided to set her sights on demystifying the dark arts of the kitchen.
Her first book, How to Eat, sold 300,000 copies in Britain alone, and she was soon the closest thing the country had to a female version of the male chefs so many of us watch, read and lionise. Nigella would go on to sell 12 million books across the world, launch a series of successful TV shows and become one of the UK’s new national treasures—an Attenborough-in-waiting, a Mary Berry armed with innuendo.
The secret of Nigella’s appeal? She made cooking fun again. Her tongue-in-cheek book, How to Be a Domestic Goddess, kickstarted a baking revolution in the country and was at the time known colloquially as the “yummy mummy’s bible.” The New York Times reviewed her 2001 TV show and suggested that “her sexy roundness, mixed with her speed-demon technique, makes cooking dinner with Nigella look like a prelude to an orgy.” Her love of a good double entendre led to a series of racy fan edits, decades before the deepfake would popularise the form. Millions of mums, and a fair few dads, tuned in to see what Nigella would do with her buns each week.
Nigella believed cooking should be about two things: “fun and family.” In the three decades since she arrived in the collective consciousness of a nation, much has changed. The kitchen—once exclusively mum’s domain, whether she liked it or not—has become a shared space where dad is, in a pattern echoing other family dynamics, playing a bigger role than ever. I wrote in January about the work required to dismantle the old commandments, at a time when “a 35-year-old millennial father living in the United States spends more time caring for his children than his baby-boomer mother did at the same age.”
Dad’s presence in the kitchen is on the front lines of the shift. It is yet another example of modern fatherhood’s position at the centre of a societal paradox, pulled between two opposing truths: more is expected of us than ever before, and—at the same time, and entirely contradictory—the bar to being what society terms a “good dad” remains low, in a manner that can feel insulting or condescending. It’s the same instinct that drives a stranger to ask “Giving Mum a break?” when they see you pushing a stroller. As society’s expectations follow us through the street, they also meet us in the kitchen.
Husbands stepping up in areas previously deemed their wives’ domain is fast becoming the norm—and not just anecdotally. Last month, a Slate piece on men cooking popped up repeatedly among the digital destinations where I waste time collect important insights to disseminate in this newsletter. The author cited his group chat: most of the millennial men he knows do the bulk of the cooking in their relationships. “At long last,” he wrote, “the kitchen is the husband’s domain.” The data backs him up. A study tracking home cooks from 2003 to 2023 found the share of men who cook at home jumped from 36% to 52%, with college-educated men posting the biggest rise—18 points. (What was a 33-point gap between men and women shrank to 20 points. Women are still ahead, but it’s closing fast.) The researcher’s best guess was lockdown—a global event that put a lot of men with little to do within arm’s reach of a hob. The habit stuck.
I asked the same question in our community of dads (which you’re very welcome to join). Of the dads who answered, over four in ten reported doing most or nearly all of the cooking, a third split it evenly, and twice as many dads said they do the bulk of the cooking as said their partner does. Which provides me with the perfect opportunity to deliver a necessary disclaimer: let the record state, in case of any misinterpretation, and for the avoidance of any doubt, that this essay is not intended to suggest that I am a domestic god. Nothing could be further from the case. But compared to the father of thirty years ago, and the thousands of men who have come before me, I’m Jamie Oliver.
Dad alone no longer brings home the bacon.
But he is, increasingly, frying it.
A List of Resources for Aspiring Chefs
Nigella was right—cooking should be fun. As my kids have gotten older, I’ve gotten a lot of joy out of cooking both for and with them. My daughter and I tackled Christmas Dinner as a duo last year, and it became a memory both of us will treasure and a huge win in the reparenting column. Seeing cooking as a hobby, and not a chore, was a personal unlock: it became something to work at, to improve, to begin to acquire the tools and techniques if not to master, then at least to get comfortable with.
Naturally, home cooking comes up a lot in the Dadscord’s #food-and-drink channel. We’ll regularly have guys boasting—with visual evidence—of airy dough bubbles and perfect sourdough crusts, or coming in to share that their kids just told them that tonight’s dinner was “the best thing we’ve ever eaten” before sharing the recipe with the rest of us.
Whether you’re already making dinner seven days a week, or looking to step your kitchen game up a level, I’ve gone through the last year of tips and tricks shared by the dads there to pull out some of the best recommendations from the hive mind—the books, apps, tools and recipes that you can incorporate into your own attempts to master the kitchen.
Three books you might buy
The Food Lab by Kenji López-Alt. My copy is well-worn. Dads praised its scientific approach to getting the basics right. This is the book you need when you want to understand why the steak is resting, or the precise difference between a boiled egg that sits for six minutes and one for eight minutes.
Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan. One dad ended up with a glut of Roma tomatoes, and the answer was Hazan’s sauce—tomatoes, a halved onion, a lump of butter, salt, 45 minutes. The best effort-to-praise ratio in any cookbook. Nigella herself said: “If this were the only cookbook you owned, neither you nor those you cooked for would ever get bored.”
How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. The book for the dad starting from zero: every recipe assumes you’ve never done this before, and most come with three variations for once you have. Recommended by more than one dad who said “this book taught me how to cook.”
Apps and sites to check out
A recipe app. Any recipe app will do, but getting into the habit of saving recipes somewhere you can regularly use them is the important thing. I bought Paprika years ago, now it’s easy to save a recipe from any site, pull it up when I’m in the supermarket, and grab what I need. Others exist—as with everything, some as a one-off payment, plenty with monthly in-app subscriptions, or you could install one on your home server as dozens of new vibe-coded alternatives pop up each month.
Serious Eats. The site where The Food Lab started life as a column; tonnes of recipes and techniques for better cooking, Kenji López-Alt’s archive included.
NYT Cooking. The New York Times didn’t invent the listicle, but they might have perfected it. Joining the Best Books and Best TV Shows of the 21st Century is this reader-picked 50 Greatest Hits from their recipe archive. If you don’t find something on here that you’d like to cook tonight, I’ll eat your hat.
Just One Cookbook, Omnivore’s Cookbook and The Woks of Life, for the nights the brief is “not pasta again”.
Teach your algorithm that you want to see recipes. Whatever feed you spend your time in, go fill it with some food. Find a few foodies and follow them, search for recipes and start saving them. We live our lives in bubbles where malevolent AIs algorithmically force-feed us content, hoping to show us more ads we will click. You should at least get some good recipe ideas out of it. My TikTok collection of saved recipes is now over 100 strong, and I haven’t made close to half. But I know it’s always there when I need inspiration.
Kitchen gear that might help
A bad golfer may blame his clubs, but your ability to enjoy time in the kitchen will increase alongside your proficiency and pleasure with the tools you’re using. A good knife doesn’t need to cost “buying a sword from Hattori Hanzō” amounts of money. The nice thing about the kitchen is that it can be a great equaliser—the Kuhn Rikon Swiss peeler, widely agreed as the best in the business, costs the same as a pint of decent beer and can be found in kitchen drawers around the world—from yours to a Michelin-starred one.
So if you’re looking to acquire gear in pursuit of greatness, here are a few ideas.
The “one thing to put things in.” This has taken many shapes over the years—the once-all-that Instant Pot, the new hot-shit air fryer. These can open up culinary options (and close down time spent over a hob) but only if you actually use the thing. Buy one and see how much you use it. Add another only when you’ve culinarymaxxed the old one.
The “great bang for your buck” accessories. I picked up an onigiri maker on AliExpress for €3. It became a regular favourite for dinner, an easy meal that the kids loved until I totally overdid it. An instant-read thermometer, a good pair of scissors that can tackle tough meats—you don’t need to push the boat out.
For the aspiring bakers amongst you. Look into a bread lame (“cheap and makes scoring so much easier”), a Dutch oven (worth its weight, if not in gold, in cast iron at least) and the most important element of all: a sourdough starter, which should cost you nothing if you ask around. One dad got it as a gift from a neighbour; a month down the rabbit hole later, it’s two loaves every weekend and “saved a lot of money at the farmers markets but can feel like a part-time job.”
Recipe ideas you can steal
Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce. 17,261 reviews on the NYT Cooking site and still standing strong with five stars. I cook this every other week. Make it once, never buy a premade pasta sauce again. Tomatoes, a halved onion, butter, salt; wait 45 minutes. Over pasta, it doubles as the minimum viable dinner (see below).
The Viral Salmon Rice Bowl. In 2021, Emily Mariko filmed a TikTok of the dinner she was making for her kids, with some leftover sushi rice, a salmon fillet and an arrangement of vegetables. Five years later, it’s still in regular rotation at our house. Looking for a way to cook the salmon? Serious Eats to the rescue, again. No salmon on hand? A tin of tuna gets you 80% of the dish at a fraction of the price, and is almost always in the cupboard.
An officially sanctioned ragù alla bolognese. When a recipe is only available as a PDF, and opens with a seal and all-caps red text telling you “DEPOSITED IN THE BOLOGNA CHAMBER OF COMMERCE ON 20 APRIL 2023”, you know it means business. The dad who cooked this reports it “does not disappoint”.
The minimum viable dinner. Of course there will be days, and maybe even evenings, when you’ll want to attempt something more adventurous, but remember there’s a floor too. So have some low-energy backups that you can rely on: a local store with a fairly decent pizza in its fridge, a few core freezer deep cuts that you can turn to, something simple with a twist that can become dad’s signature dish.
Good Dadvice
Share a Family Favourite Recipe
And that’s where I’m going to leave it this week, as I’d love to do something we haven’t done in a while: a weekend open thread. I’ll jump in and share a few favourite recipes from the NYT Cooking 50 with gift links, and I’d love to read your family staple recipes so the rest of us can steal with glee, or hear about your must-have gear or memorable kitchen stories.
Signing Off
Now that this one is out of my to-do list and into your inbox, I gotta go figure out what we’re having for dinner. How did you like this week’s issue?
Loved | Great | OK | Meh | Bad
I bet you look good in the Dadscord.
