Interview with Nigella We met Nigella Lawson and learned more about her cooking inspirations, as well as the peculiar pressures of being labelled a 'domestic goddess'.

Who has been the most inspirational cook in your life?

My mother, without a doubt. Not that I cook everything she did, it's just that her slapdash way of cooking, combined with her great sense of taste and feeling for food, has influenced me in so many ways. She followed her instinct and didn't listen out for any kind of authority on how things should be cooked. She was an instinctive, a passionate and sometimes a slightly resentful cook. I never once saw my mother cook from a cookbook.

If cooking were banned from your life, and eating was purely functional, how would you derive pleasure and fill your days?

There have been times when I haven't cooked. That's one of the things I find difficult about staying in hotels. It's lovely for a while and then you miss it, terribly. I get a lot of pleasure from reading. I'm essentially a reader of fiction, though I'm keen on memoirs and essays too. I would also write: cooking and writing have a lot in common.

In How to Eat you said, "Cooking is not so different to literature: what you have read previously shapes how you read now". Of all the literature, gastronomic or not, what has had the most lasting effect on your style of cooking?

What I meant by that was that when you read a contemporary novel you bring to bear sensibility honed from years of reading, an understanding of the shape of the novel, much like the way you develop as a cook.

As for writing that's had an effect on my cooking, I would have to say Laurie Colwin, an American writer, who's sadly dead now. I was glad I came across her after I'd written my first book; otherwise I'm sure I would have been far too inhibited and thought it not worth bothering. The best food writing is writing that brings food into a life story, and the food comes in and out of the narrative. Nora Ephron's Heartburn is a great example of this. It's about a marriage breakdown, which is told through food.

Your musical choices caused some interest when you were a guest on Desert Island Discs (Eminem, Chemical Brothers, etc). What music (if any) do you like to listen to when you cook?

None. I don't have the most fabulous music taste, I have to admit. I much prefer to listen to the human voice talking when I'm cooking. You rarely have peace and quiet with the children running around, so it's nice to snatch some silence.

What would be your desert island dish?

Am I only allowed one dish? Can I have a meal at least? In which case my first choice would be Christmas lunch; otherwise I'd go for roast chicken with roast potatoes, mashed potatoes, chips and peas - a very balanced meal!

You must find people have such high expectations when they come around to your house for dinner. Do you often feel the pressure of being Nigella and that everything you serve has to be just perfect?

I do. I do. And all I ever do is give people roast chicken. I try and make a good pudding so they forgive me though - something like chocolate cheesecake or apple cheesecake with caramel sauce.

You have been quoted as saying: "Cooking is actually quite aggressive and controlling and sometimes there is an element of force-feeding going on" - how does it make you feel if one of your guests doesn't like something you've gone to a lot of trouble to cook?

I'm normally angry with myself if something goes wrong, but if it goes right and people don't like it, well, fair enough

I didn't mean that as a criticism of cooking for people; I said that to warn against the danger of idolising cooking, imagining it's all about nature and love. It's not necessarily ‘aggressive'. People have different tastes; they like different things. But I also said this in the context of family, rather than social occasions. I'm normally angry with myself if something goes wrong, but if it goes right and people don't like it, well, fair enough.

Do you ever have days when you question whether food and cooking is deserved of so much of your time and attention? Are there things you'd rather do?

Never ever. I don't cook non-stop every day. I love it. But the wonderful thing about cooking is that you can do other things at the same time - writing a column, for example. Cooking can help you shift your argument or work out your opening paragraph. It doesn't block other things, it helps them.

Your name is now frequently used as an adjective - as in ‘that's so Nigella' - when describing food that has an air of the domestic goddess about it. How do you feel about your name being used in that way?

Is it? Well it's amusing and quite flattering. I don't think that refers to me anyway. It's an idea of me. I won't reflect too deeply on it though - I've got enough sense of myself.

How does your background in studying languages influence your cooking?

When I was young I lived in Italy for a while, which influenced my cooking enormously. Food has similarities with language. It has its own vocabulary and grammar, if you like. If you're interested in those kinds of structures, the two things can feed off one another quite easily.

Do you ever have 'off' days when everything you cook doesn't quite turn out right? How critical are you of yourself on such days, if at all?

I do have days when things don't go right. I'm always impatient, and sometimes quite hasty. It can start when I'm overtired. I'll miss out a major ingredient and then I'll be edging towards hysteria. It's impossible not to feel slightly discouraged or depressed. But then again, you can expect something to be bad and it tastes fabulous. It's the nature of experiment: some things work, some things don't.

And it's not a test. You need to take a step back and say, ‘what's the worst that can happen?' If it's that your dinner's not going to taste great, if that's really the worst thing that could happen to you, well you're a lucky person.

BBC Food interviewed Nigella in November 2006.