Nigella's Amsterdam Christmas. Photograph: Jay Brooks/BBC Studios
It is best not to ask questions about Nigella’s Amsterdam Christmas. Do not ask why Nigella has gone to the Netherlands for her festive feast. Why is she hosting a Dutch Christmas party? Hush now, a finger on the lips. Why is she cooking on a boat? It is a boat so gorgeous that TV’s last lovely houseboat, the one in Copenhagen from season two of The Bear, must be jealous of its fixtures and fittings. Does she have a lot of Dutch friends? Why is she visiting their home city and then throwing them a party? Shhh, don’t worry about it. Just settle in – sink in, might be even better – and enjoy the velvety loveliness.
Nobody does description like Nigella. This is what makes her cookbooks such a pleasure to read. You can pick one up with the intention of finding a recipe and end up reading it like a novel. She really lets rip on Amsterdam, a city she first visited half a lifetime ago, she says, and it is hard to deny that it is a particularly beautiful city at Christmas. She describes the light on the water and explains why the buildings are narrow, and when she gets on to ingredients and the dishes themselves, the adjectives fly as if reindeer are pulling them through the sky. Just wait until she advocates for fennel.
She walks across the canal bridges, ruminating on the modernity of a place where you can “always feel the bustle of the past”. She goes to bars and tries their cocktails. She visits shops and buys their produce, chatting about the provenance of the food and the flavours and the merits, itself a brief reminder of the bustle of the past; you can’t have a long conversation about the proper way to pronounce “gouda” and how creamy it is at the self-service checkout. (The cheesemonger, who is clearly thrilled to be talking about why the crunchy bits of posh cheese are not salt but crystallised protein, might be the only person in the Netherlands more inclined to food-based poetry than she is.) Then she throws her Christmas party for her Dutch friends, with its gorgeous toasted nuts and the creamy gouda and tulip biscuits.
This is a tourist-board-friendly version of Amsterdam and there is a distinct lack of the sort of tourists it wishes to dissuade from visiting. The bars Nigella visits are elegant and twinkly, rather than stuffed with stag-dos, and there is no wonky traveller who has overstayed their welcome in a coffee shop. (Nigella does go to a coffee shop, but not that sort, and she uses it to introduce a Dutch almond pastry.) There is a specific middle-class aesthetic to this vision of the place and the sort of food it and Nigella might inspire you to make. It is all vintage biscuit tins and candlelight and old ceramics.
But there is a sort of cooking manifesto here, too, hanging around the edges of the shabby-chic sheen. Over a bar snack of bitterballen, she explains that there is a distinction between the kind of food you eat when you go out, and the sort you make at home. Christmas, especially, can be a time of stress for those who are preparing the food, and her message is that this shouldn’t be the case. The aspirations are reserved for kitchenware – her “magic wand” for icing sugar is the sort of semi-useless wonder tool that makes you think, you could just use a sieve and, also, would it be completely outrageous to get one? – but she is clear that entertaining should not be a source of pressure and angst. So the dishes she makes are fairly simple, in that they can be done in advance, for the most part. The dessert is not cooked at all. There is a strong sense that it is better to enjoy the tipples and the company and the lovely barge than it is to strive for a restaurant-standard menu.
Of course, this is a fantasy affair, and Nigella’s Amsterdam Christmas knows it. It lingers on details, on delicious, probably not cheap ingredients, and on the light playing on the water. It is a dreamy version of a Christmas bash, classy, sophisticated, casually chic, chicly casual. But just when you start to wonder if it is too much of a fantasy, Nigella proves once again that she is all of us: she pops out after her own party, to soak up the excess with some chips, cheese and mayo.
• Nigella’s Amsterdam Christmas was on BBC One and is available on iPlayer.
