Nigella Lawson is celebrating a momentous milestone - the 25th anniversary of the release of her classic baking bible, How to Be a Domestic Goddess.
To mark the occasion, she shared a series of the sweetest pictures to Instagram, one of which showed Nigella when she was very young, accompanied in the snap by a very classic pudding.
While her book remains timeless, the cooking and baking superstar couldn't quite believe it had been on the shelves for such a long time.
"I find it hard to fathom, but How To Be A Domestic Goddess is a quarter of a century old this week!" she wrote. Ruminating on the concept of time, Nigella added, "that’s the thing about the passage of time: it feels as if it came out both yesterday and also a lifetime ago – which of course, it was."
Recalling that those in the industry either refer to themselves as a cook or a baker, she says she felt inspired to be both.
"I saw myself very much as a cook," she says of the divide between cooking and baking, adding, "but then I discovered how easy baking actually could be, and how joyful, and my enthusiasm propelled me to write HTBADG."
Nigella shared with her followers just how turbulent the journey was to get the book onto the shelves, revealing that at the time, it was deemed an "outlandish proposition."
"When I mentioned the idea to my then editor, she was, initially, doubtful in the extreme" the star recalls. "In the UK, at any rate, baking was seen as the province of some notional rural granny, an uncool throwback that had nothing to do with The Way We Live Now," she says.
With the idea of a baking book being "bafflingly old-fashioned," she forged ahead and rooted for what went on to become a huge selling, award-winning hit.
Sharing her thoughts on the throwback, celebratory snaps, Nigella went on to say, "what really brings home how many years have passed since HTBADG was published is seeing these pictures taken at the time."
While the first picture is an incredibly young Nigella, in the second, she is "glammed up for the launch party." She went on to add, wisely, "at the time, I thought I was old; from my vantage point now, I look like a child!"
Many will identify with this - it's very easy to believe the age you are currently, is indeed, "old." By the next decade, there's always the shift to realising how young you really looked felt when believing yourself to be so aged.
As Nigella concludes poignantly, "but as with so much in life, it’s a matter of perspective."
