Every Saturday night, Nadiya Hussain sits between her three children on their living room floor in Milton Keynes and feeds them with her hands. As a child, growing up with five siblings, her mother did the same, cramming the glass plate from the bottom of the microwave with rice. For her, it was about efficiency, making sure every child was fed quickly, and with the least washing up; for Hussain it’s the opposite, a slowing down. A moment.
“I know the idea of using your hands to feed one kid and then the same hand to feed the other, lots of people are almost disgusted by that. But to be able to sit with your children around you, with rice and curry…” She shrugs, smiling. Since winning Bake Off three years ago, making millions cry with her promise “I’m never going to put boundaries on myself ever again”, and embarking on a career that has included but not been limited to: three BBC series, three cookbooks, three children’s books, and one novel, her family’s food traditions have taken on a luminous, almost magical importance. “My kids still cannot eat rice with a spoon, they only use their fingers, and that’s a tradition I’ve kept. Once a month we have ‘dessert for dinner’ night. I’ll make four separate desserts. They’ll come home from school and eat as much cake and custard and ice cream as they can physically get in their guts. Because sometimes I think, let them just be children. And that’s nice, because it allows the child in you to come out as well.”
Hussain never planned to become famous. So famous that she must stop for selfies with strangers, so famous that the nurse asked “What’s Paul Hollywood like?” in the middle of a smear test. She never planned to be a cook, or a writer, or to go on telly – her husband Abdal filled out her Bake Off application. “He did it because I have a panic disorder, and I suffer with anxiety, and he knew that I’d given so much of myself to him and the kids that I’d stopped doing anything for me.” She never planned to refocus food TV away from professionals. She never planned to become a national treasure, one that humanised and disproved the tabloid image of a dangerous, repressed hijab-wearing Muslim in part by being, well, lovely, or, as Professor Ted Cantle, who wrote the government report on the 2001 race riots in northern England, put it, “do more for British-Muslim relations than 10 years of government policy”.
“Yeah, that feels really … heavy on my shoulders,” she says. “But also, quite a privilege, quite an honour, even just to hear that sentence out loud.”
And, of course, she never planned to bake the Queen’s 90th birthday cake. “It’s mad, because I’m just this five-foot-one Muslim brown girl with three kids, who kind of … had a life before all of this. I never dreamed of doing anything other than that. I only ever baked because it helped with my anxiety.” At one point she was spending half the week in bed, something she’s tentatively started using Instagram to document. “I am as average as they get – there is nothing special about me. I’m just getting by. You know, I just want an easy life. I want to,” she is emotional suddenly, her eye contact hypnotic – her proportions are doll-like, her gaze is earnest, “I want to raise children who I can give back to society and say, ‘Here you go. This is the product of me,’ and I want to be proud of that. And that’s all I really want out of life.”
Rather than the hijab which, to her parents’ bemusement, she started wearing at 14, or her arranged marriage to Abdal (their love affair happened backwards: “We fell in love after two kids,” she says), it could be argued that the most controversial thing about Hussain, who is noisily blowing her nose, is the way she insists on the importance of the role of a housewife. “When I was a stay-at-home mum, people would ask me, ‘So what do you do?’ and I’d say: ‘I’m a housewife.’ The looks that I used to get! The more I heard, ‘So, when are you going to get an actual job?’ the less I valued the job that I did. I think that’s really sad, because it meant I didn’t value or understand the importance of what I was doing at the time. Now, looking back, had I known I would be doing this,” she gestures around the vast photography studio where we sit, her stylist and makeup artist packing up their bags in the light of a Hollywood vanity mirror, “I think I would have appreciated being at home with my kids a little bit more. Raising a child, surely that in itself is the biggest thing we’re ever going to do?” She doesn’t have a cleaner, or a nanny – she and her husband share the responsibilities of running their home, “because that’s our job”. One benefit of being a stay-at-home mum was that it allowed Abdal to flourish in his career – now they’ve switched. “It’s his turn – he spends more time with the kids, picking them up, dropping them off and, well, he can’t cook so … reheating food I’ve cooked? But my kids see me doing something I enjoy, and I always ask them, ‘Who’s got the better job, Daddy or me?’ and they always say me, because Daddy works in IT, and IT cannot give you cakes.”
And yes, she can give her children cakes, but the more unexpected detail of her professional life, is what cakes have given her. “If you’d asked a couple of years ago, I would have said I just wanted to bake. But actually, this is more than a job.” She raises her chin. “I realise the importance of being out there now, because growing up I didn’t see girls like me on television. I didn’t see brown skin. I didn’t see people from ethnic minorities. I didn’t see girls with headscarves. Until Goodness Gracious Me, the TV screen was white.”
It strikes me that she is extremely good at talking, this 33-year-old mother with a panic disorder, and it would have been a terrible waste of talent if her husband had not persuaded her to go on TV. Good at talking – it sounds like nothing. But such a skill, ideally (as in Hussain’s case) when accompanied with intelligence and something to say, is a rare thing, and one that will undoubtedly carry her through a number more careers after the cakes have cooled. Whatever she touches is imbued with cosiness. “I’m there to create the space. And what I’m hoping is, by staying in mainstream television and doing what I love, I can create that space for generations to come.”
Part of that though, involves fielding abuse, both as a person in the public eye and as a Muslim woman in the world. Last year she told her 198,000 Twitter followers that a man had moved away from her on a train, saying, “I ain’t sitting near a Muslim.”
“There was a time when I would just stay very quiet, but now I think it’s really important to speak up. Because if they said it to my kids I’d nudge them and say: ‘Don’t shy away. Don’t cower, don’t take it.’”
This inner confidence is inherited. One weekend, as a child in Luton, Hussain went to the market with her father Jamir to buy a chainsaw. “We were like, ‘What does he need a chainsaw for? He works in a restaurant.’ He said, ‘You’ll see.’” He went out, and told his family to clear the dining table before he returned. Through the window they watched him come, stumbling slightly, a dead sheep across his shoulders. “He’s only a little man, about five-foot-six, and kind of plodding up the road, and all you can see is this dead carcass and Dad. And he’s like, ‘Get out the way!’ He slaps this sheep down onto the table and goes, ‘Who wants to see how you chainsaw a sheep?’ And that’s what he did. The freezer was full of meat for at least a month.”
Her Bangladeshi family have stomachs of steel, she boasts, partly because of their diet of fermented fish, but also because of her father’s experimental cooking, and his insistence that everybody must clean their plate, regardless of whether or not the “mussels curry” he’d made (having let the mussels sit in the sink for a day or two, and having pried open any that refused to open) was fresh. And his excitement about the possibilities of tinkering with traditional dishes has been passed down – see, for instance, her “chaat in a bag” recipe, using tortilla chips and ketchup, and her samosa pie, and her obsession with the humble tinned peach.
After the kids have gone to bed, Hussain will take a breath, and glance at Twitter. Sometimes it’s full of people telling her she’s not a good enough Muslim, sometimes not a good enough Brit, sometimes not a good enough mother. “I’ve had comments saying things like, ‘Get out of our country,’ suggesting that I don’t belong here. I’m not going to take that. I’m just not. This is my country, this is my home. I will not be told to leave. Never. But I pick and choose what to respond to. If I’m feeling really fragile that day I’ll just say to myself, I haven’t got the energy for this fight.”
A recent post on Hussain’s Instagram showed her in a towelling robe, recovering from a panic attack – her husband had washed her, and put her to bed. That was not a night for Twitter. “But I’m really aware of the fact that my kids are getting closer to becoming teenagers, so it’s not going to be long before they’re going to be on social media. And it’s going to be really hard for them to watch someone say something to their mum. But I want to balance the scales, so I’ll try and turn my response into a positive, because I don’t want them to look back and think, ‘God, Mum’s not a very nice person.’”
Every choice she makes is with her children in mind, and every conversation starts and ends with them, like internal punctuation. About six months after Hussain won Bake Off, with a lemon drizzle cake stuck with jewels and a red, white and blue sari, somebody asked her son what her mum did, that housewife conversation again. He thought about it for a minute, she says, mimicking his head falling to the side. “And then he said: ‘I know. She lives her dreams. That’s what she does.’” Grinning, she clasps her hands together, but rather than holding them over her heart, she puts them to her belly, as if he’s fed her the most beautiful meal.
Nadiya Hussain’s homeware range is available at nadiyahussain.com
