Prue Leith has handed in her apron, and Nigella Lawson is taking her place beside Paul Hollywood on “The Great British Baking Show.” It’s a big change for the beloved series, but Lawson is hardly a stranger to talking about cake on television. For decades, she’s made cooking feel less like a test of skill and more like a pleasure worth sharing.
“Of course it’s daunting to be following in the footsteps of Prue Leith and Mary Berry before her, great dames both,” Lawson said, “but I’m also bubbling with excitement.”
As the new season begins, we’re taking a closer look at the woman behind the cookbooks and late-night fridge raids — including the Jewish family and food traditions that helped shape her.
Is Nigella Lawson Jewish?
Yes. Both of Lawson’s parents came from Jewish families, though she has said she wasn’t raised keeping kosher or observing Jewish rituals. Her father, Nigel Lawson, served as Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer; her mother, Vanessa Salmon, was an heir to the J. Lyons & Co. food empire. At home, Lawson experienced Jewishness most clearly at the table.
“They were in every way, essentially about the food,” Lawson told the Australian Jewish News. “They were totally, culturally, Jewish – from cooking too much, to feeding anyone the moment they walk through the door, and giving them things to take home.”
That impulse extended across generations. Lawson remembers a grandmother who wouldn’t accept no when offering seconds and insisted that a final helping would otherwise go begging. Her great-aunt Myra, meanwhile, would ask whether the food was all right before a guest had managed to take a bite.
Her family’s Jewish history goes back centuries
Lawson comes from a family that fed far more than the people around its own table. Her mother was an heir to J. Lyons & Co., whose tea shops and restaurants were once fixtures of British life. The business grew out of a partnership between the Salmon and Gluckstein families, who had started out selling tobacco in London’s East End.
On the BBC genealogy series “Who Do You Think You Are?,” Lawson followed those branches of her family tree beyond London. One ancestor, Samuel Gluckstein, had left Prussia for England in the 1840s after a series of antisemitic attacks in his area.
Another line took her to Amsterdam, where she hoped to learn whether she had Sephardic ancestors whose families had come from Spain or Portugal.
The records told a different story. Lawson’s ancestor Hannah Sammes came from an Ashkenazi family connected to Amsterdam’s Great Synagogue. The last name Sammes is derived from sjamasj, meaning “carer of the synagogue.” Researchers found the Hebrew signature of one of her forebears in a Jewish community record from 1709.
The search also turned up a less illustrious family story: Hannah’s father fled to England after being convicted of stealing lottery tickets. And it raised a more painful question about Lawson’s grandfather Felix Salmon. Family members believed he had been among the British soldiers who arrived at Bergen-Belsen after its liberation. His military records place him in northwestern Europe in April 1945 as a major in the Army Catering Corps, but do not establish whether he was at the camp.
The episode also brought out a frightening family memory from World War II. Lawson’s brother Dominic said their grandparents, as a prominent Jewish family, were on a Nazi list of people to be rounded up if Britain was invaded. They had prepared cyanide pills in case that happened.
Passover became part of her family life
Lawson’s first husband, the journalist John Diamond, had grown up with more Jewish religious practice than she had. She has said that being married to him helped her understand that part of her own identity differently. When Diamond became ill with cancer, the Passover seder became especially meaningful to them, and Lawson prepared seder dinners at his request.
“I think that if you are Jewish, you feel that food as sustenance is important; food as a way of forging bonds with people and a sense of family is important; but we also cannot help but to think of food symbolically,” Lawson said. We don’t have to be taught that. It’s not about any religious thing – it’s in how we are.”
The seder’s symbolism stayed with Lawson. She has spoken about being moved by the salt water on the table, which recalls the tears of the Israelites enslaved in Egypt. Years later, she hosted a seder for 30 friends and cooked it with her friend, the Israeli-British chef Yotam Ottolenghi.
She was moved by the meanings built into the meal, particularly the salt water that represents the tears of the Israelites enslaved in Egypt. Years later, she hosted a seder for 30 friends and shared the cooking with Israeli-British chef Yotam Ottolenghi. Passover also has a place in her cookbook “Feast,” which includes a chapter devoted to seder night.
Jewishness at Nigella Lawson’s table
She described food as a way of forging family bonds and said her “Jewish approach to food” helped draw her to writing about it.
Lawson’s mother’s braised chicken is one dish she has carried into her own kitchen. Made with carrots, celery, parsley and leeks, along with white wine and garlic-infused olive oil, it has the familiar ingredients of Ashkenazi comfort food. When Lawson published it in “Kitchen,” she joked about the portion size: “serves four – or eight gentiles.”
Her mother died at 48, and her sister died at 31. Lawson has said that preserving the food they made and ate together was part of what drove her to write her first cookbook, “How to Eat.”
“So, I wrote my first book, I think partly, but for a lot of other reasons, I felt that home cooking was being taken over, and it was all about restaurant food – but, really at the heart of it was this need to memorialise their food, and the food we cooked together, and ate together. That felt very important to me… It felt so difficult not having that conversation with them: ‘What are you having for dinner tonight?’, so it was my way of continuing it,” she said.
Making her mother’s chicken for her children gives them a connection to a grandmother they never knew. Writing about food gave Lawson a way to continue the everyday conversations she could no longer have with her mother and sister.
“Every single recipe I write, in a way comes a bit from my mother, even though I don’t cook the same food as her always. … that chicken is very important for me,” she said.
Jewish food surfaces throughout her work. On “Nigella Bites,” she made matzah ball soup, using the Yiddish name kneidlach for the dumplings. Her recipes also include honey cakes for Rosh Hashanah and a version of rugelach she calls “scuffles.”
Jewish history of “The Great British Baking Show”
Lawson isn’t the first Jewish person to enter the tent. Matt Lucas, who hosted the show from 2020 to 2022, has spoken about his family history, including a relative who lived with Anne Frank’s family in Amsterdam. In 2017, contestant Stacey Hart brought her Jewish background to the competition; the show’s official bio noted that she made challah for her family’s Friday night dinners.
The show’s treatment of Jewish baking, though, has sometimes puzzled viewers. In a bread-week technical challenge, Paul Hollywood asked contestants to make an eight-strand “plaited loaf” without identifying it as challah, claiming that braided loaves were a lost art. His “How to Bake” recipe for a “Cholla Loaf” drew further criticism for describing the bread as traditionally served at Passover, when Jews refrain from eating leavened bread. The recipe also included milk and butter, whereas challah served with a meat meal is generally made without dairy by those who keep kosher.
Jewish viewers had similar complaints when contestants made rainbow bagels and chocolate babka in 2020. The show offered little context for either bread’s Jewish origins, and Prue Leith raised New Yorkers’ eyebrows by saying Hollywood’s babka was better than the versions she’d eaten there.
There have been warmer moments. In 2021, Jürgen Krauss made a Passover-inspired pavlova topped with charoset and matzah. Krauss isn’t Jewish, but his wife and son are, and he bakes challah for their family and synagogue. After the judges praised his dessert, Lucas offered him a “Mazel tov.” Lawson arrives with her own relationship to Jewish food — and, perhaps, a better chance of recognizing a challah when one appears in the tent.
