Good morning,
My very special Formal Assignment for today is to tell you about Nicola Lamb. Many, if not most, of you will already know of her deep dives into pastry subjects at her Kitchen Projects Substack (to which, I should mention, I am a contributor). But I wanted to give you a closer look at the incredibly talented, industrious, generous and kind person behind the screen and (now, with her book, SIFT, which celebrated its North American release this week) the page. Pour yourself some coffee or Lillet; this piece is a bit longer than my usual.
I hope you’ll enjoy reading what follows as much as I enjoyed talking with Nicola. And in today’s Formal Assignment P.S.* I’m sharing a gorgeous recipe from Nicola’s book for Caramel Poached Oranges with Sabayon and Langues de Chat.
A giveaway: For a chance to win a copy of SIFT and a one-year “paid” subscription to Formal Assigment, read this.
Talk to you soon. Thank you for reading this.
Brian
*Formal Assignment P.S. is for paid subscribers. It’s just $5 a month—or even less for an annual subscription. 🎁 Did you know you can gift a F.A. subscription to a beloved? You can! Right here!
SIFT, AND YE SHALL FIND
How Nicola Lamb Became a Pastry-World Star
If I were a quince, I’d want to be in the fruit bowl on Nicola Lamb’s kitchen counter.
I would cherish the memories of my top-notch upbringing in the English countryside; I’d be proud to have made my way to a charmed, if brief, life in a chic London neighborhood; and I would accept the honorable fate that awaited me as a component in a fabulous dessert — and in a recipe, if I were lucky, that would immortalize me.
“Look at these,” Nicola said as she scooped up the actual fruits from behind her and presented them through the Zoom screen when we spoke in late October. “Proper orchard quince from Brogdale” (the 150-acre home of the U.K.’s National Fruit Collection with close to 3,500 varieties of fruit trees). “I’m using them to perfume my house.”
Also in her kitchen today: apples. “I have so many apples right now. What [varieties] did I get today? Cornish Gilliflowers and Ananas Reinettes. I think my greengrocer thinks I’m crazy because every time I go, I buy like two kilos of apples. I become so addicted to them during this time.”
“I’m trying to bake a really simple apple galette, but for some reason, I’m overthinking how thick to cut the apples.” She’s feeling the stress of having to “bank some content” before leaving for her 18-day U.S. book tour in ten days. (She’s also packing the freezer with jars of homemade ragù so that friends expecting to deliver a baby while Nicola’s away can come by and help themselves.)
Kitchen Projects
The content Nicola is pressed to bank is for her thriving Substack newsletter,
. (Here’s the resulting apple galette recipe she published a few days after our conversation.)Like so much digital documentation of culinary endeavors (and so many sourdough starters), Kitchen Projects was born of the global pandemic some four years ago. “During lockdown, I had this realization that there are some recipes for famous pastries that I’ve never made before. I was like, ‘What if I just made cannoli?’” She alerted, via Instagram stories, her roughly 4,500 engaged followers, whom she’d amassed thanks to the online pastry classes she’d led earlier in lockdown: “I was like ‘Hey, I’m gonna make cannoli for the first time. I’ve read a bunch of recipes online. Let’s try!”
On November 8, 2020, Nicola published “Kitchen Project #001: CANNOLI”.
She didn’t hide the failures, writing openly about what worked and what didn’t. “And, in this trial-and-error process, which is still the bread and butter of what I do, I realized that there was so much to learn on the way to getting to your final product. And, especially on Instagram, you rarely see that; people don’t want to show their shitty versions of stuff.”
Her approach proved appealing. Four years to the month after posting her first recipe to Substack (where, with around sixty-four thousand subscribers, she has one of the top food publications), Nicola has written more than 150 “Kitchen Projects” and, oh, a blockbuster cookbook.
SIFT
SIFT is out this week in North America (The U.K. edition was published in May and was an immediate Sunday Times bestseller).
The quick success of Kitchen Projects drew the attention of the cookbook world. “My agent, Emily Sweet, actually found me on Substack quite early – I would say maybe six months into my writing – and she said ‘Hey, have you ever thought about writing a book?’ It was good timing because of COVID; I think people were more attached to what they were seeing and reading online. So I was very lucky.” A year and a half later (during which time other inquiries came from interested editors), Nicola finally felt ready to submit her proposal to Emily.
Upon publication, the book was immediately embraced by home and professional bakers; Nigella Lawson, Nigel Slater, Yotam Ottolenghi, and Jamie Oliver were among the British culinary royalty to rave about SIFT. Nicola toured the U.K. – Scotland, the West Country, Wales – and has recently embarked on her U.S. tour. At each stop, there’s a collaboration with a local bakery.
Released on November 12, the North American edition of SIFT was “Americanized” by author
, who tested potential problem recipes with American ingredients and added Fahrenheit temperatures and volumetric measurements. “All the facts are the same” in both editions, noted Nicola, “because sugar acts the same in the U.K. as it does in the U.S., even though – why don’t you guys have caster sugar?” (What is called “superfine sugar” in the U.S. is much less widely available than its British counterpart, but it can be approximated by grinding standard granulated sugar in a food processor or blender.)After her weeks in the U.S. – at the time I write this, she’s in San Francisco after a stop in Seattle; next up is L.A., New York, then, finally, Minneapolis, in her husband’s home state – she’ll be able to exhale and luxuriate in the comfort of her regular routine. She’ll unpack the pâtisserie equipment she’s lugged across the ocean for demos – fluted thimble-shaped molds to make canelés, cubic molds to make little almond croissant blocks – and restore each item to its proper place.
How It Started. . .
Nicola grew up in Brighton, the coastal city some fifty miles south of London.
And although as a kid she baked with her grandmother and as a teen she “watched too much MasterChef” and had a supper club with her friend Genevieve, a culinary career wasn’t one that Nicola had always known she would pursue. “I always loved English and writing, but I never felt like I was writer-y enough to be a writer. I think I was always waiting for the right topic, I guess, or something that made sense to me. I really don’t think I knew [what I wanted], to be honest. That’s why I was so anti going to university; I really just needed time to work out who I was.” At eighteen, after her A-levels, she had the wisdom to say, “I really don’t think I’m responsible enough to decide what I want to do for the next four years.”
She moved to London and got an internship in theatre and arts publicity. The internship turned into a job, and, with few friends in London, she did more and more baking in her spare time. She gradually became “the person that would bring in the cake to the office on birthdays” and on Mondays. Coworkers’ compliments flowed and Nicola’s passion snowballed, and she applied and was accepted to the pastry program at the French Culinary Institute (now part of the Institute of Culinary Education) in New York.
Once in New York for school, she began working at Dominique Ansel’s renowned bakery. She found she preferred the rapid pace of on-the-job education to that of classroom learning, and after five or six months of school, she quit in favor of pursuing professional experience.
As her U.S. visa was contingent on her student status, she returned to London. Her first post there was at Ottolenghi, where she worked under Verena Lochmuller – “still one of my biggest mentors and someone that I collaborate with” – a co-author of the most recent Ottolenghi book, Comfort.
In her subsequent tenure at Little Bread Pedlar, she had a conversation with head baker Adam Sellar that she still thinks about “all the time.” She’d fallen for Sellar’s hot cross buns and asked if he minded if she copied the recipe down to make them for her parents at Easter. Surprised that she had felt required to ask, Sellar replied, as Nicola recalled, “Look, a recipe is just a recipe. Sure, it can be precious in cases of things like, you know, KFC, but I don’t mind if someone has my formulation for sourdough, because they don’t know what I know after years of making it. And you can only learn that by asking me or by working and learning and earning that recipe.” That attitude of “openness” and “sharing” contrasted with a protectiveness she’d witnessed elsewhere and struck Nicola as extraordinary. “That’s something that really drives me now with my newsletter and with SIFT: I want you to know everything that I know. It benefits me zero to hold on to information that could help other people. Maybe this is really naïve, but I think that it’s okay if someone takes a recipe from my book and sells it in their café,” because it’s “not just about the recipe; it’s about how you make it. It’s about how you present it. It’s about the ingredients you pick.” It all jibes, Nicola said, with an “abundance mindset.”
“Fuck yeah – let’s drink the custard.”
How It’s Going. . .
As intertwined as her success is with the virtual connections the internet has offered, Nicola unequivocally favors the real world: the crunch of a heritage apple; the pleasures of her daily neighborhood walk and of interactions with local characters along the route; an old-fashioned hours-long phone chat.
“My favorite and most important thing in my daily routine is my neighborhood walks. Every day I take the same walk around the same park” – Highbury Field – “and the same shops, and I get to see the neighborhood slowly changing” through the seasons. “I get to go to my greengrocer and see which apple is showing up this week that wasn’t there last week. I get to beg them to tell me when quinces are going to arrive.”
“I leave the house at the same time every day, go to the same coffee shop.” She finds that in the “siloed world of freelance writing,” with no boss or coworkers to answer to, “you have to create structure in your life. Doing my walks every day is such a beautiful way of getting out and making sure that my day starts.” By ten A.M., she’s in her home kitchen and ready to test recipes; her beloved cat, Pancake, is rarely ever far.
“I have a very, very regular schedule,” Nicola told me.1 “I use every moment I have. I’m disciplined because – I don’t know – I feel so lucky that I’ve managed to have a career in a job that I love. It’s extraordinary.”
Is there anything that can throw a wrench in the routine? Yes: a phone call. “Once I get on the phone” with a friend or one of her two sisters, “I can just have a chat for hours. It’s terrible. I will try and keep cooking, but…”
I asked Nicola how she responds to the question I dread at a cocktail party: “What do you do?”
“I would say I’m a pastry chef,” but calling oneself a pastry chef without an attachment to a restaurant or bakery feels spurious, she admits. “I would say now I’m a writer, but my identity still lies firmly in cooking. I do think that at some point I’ll probably have a bakery, so I’ll feel more like a chef again then.”
One could surmise that success in Nicola’s line of work relies on good writing and on beautiful, tempting images that are sufficiently entertaining and informative for the vast majority of potential readers who won’t actually make the recipes detailed; it relies on skillful self-promotion that doesn’t reek of desperation. All that may be true. But Nicola points to an entirely unsexy and underappreciated virtue that is key to her success: consistency, which, she thinks, “people underestimate as an important quality in any part of your life. And I don’t think people talk about it because it’s such a boring thing to say. And I don’t just mean [doing something] every day; I mean consistent quality, as well. Whether that’s health, relationships, or baking: don’t overextend yourself in a way that you can’t repeat. You have to set yourself at a pace that you feel you can continue at, because otherwise you get burnt out.”
“I do think that the real difference between a good restaurant or bakery and a really good restaurant or bakery is consistency. There’s a bakery in London that I really want to love, but every time I go in there, the bread is different. I can’t stand it!”
The value Nicola places on consistency is on public display: she has published at roughly the same time every Sunday morning since starting Kitchen Projects. Keeping that strict deadline in mind solves the problem of the potentially infinite time that could otherwise go into perfecting a recipe: “Recipe developing is like scratching an itch. I know that’s not a delicious analogy when you’re talking about baking, but I find that knowing when to stop is so difficult.”
.
While each Kitchen Projects post takes a deep dive into subjects associated with a given recipe, Nicola took advantage of the holistic quality of a book to organize SIFT differently, rounding much of the “deep dive”-type material into the front section so that it can be learned, referred to, and applied to all relevant recipes, both within and beyond the book’s cover. “I wrote SIFT hoping that the front section fills in a lot of that context that you can’t always fit into a recipe. Especially when I first started baking like ten years ago, I found that I really wanted somewhere I had all that [contextual] information upfront and then I could take it in as a whole and apply it to the recipes rather than doing it piecemeal within each recipe. So, someone like my husband, who has only just started baking, can actually read four paragraphs on browning butter in a way that doesn’t break” a given recipe; Instead, “He can understand deeply” and apply that new knowledge when it’s called for. Indeed, her novice-baker husband has successfully made a number of SIFT recipes, which she considers “a thumbs up.”
Nicola’s writing in both Kitchen Projects and SIFT manages to glow with friendliness and personality without the diaristic, profoundly personal and memory-based slant of much food writing. “When I brought this up, she explained: “The book is dedicated to my nanny Carole, who I used to bake with, and her brownies.” But to flip through the book in search of Nanny Carole’s brownie recipe would be futile; it’s not there. “There is no way I’m every sharing Carole’s brownie recipe, because I’m so sensitive about it. Look, there are lots of flavors that are so important and nostalgic to me that I don’t know would be the most delicious to everyone else, and I’m so protective of some of those flavors that I tend not to dig too deeply into them. Generally, I don’t pillage those personal memories as much. My dad’s Chinese, so I do have a few recipes in the book which are influenced by growing up with a Chinese dad who would cook burnt spring onion oil-soy sauce noodles for me, but for the most part I’m drawing recipes from my time working in bakeries, which, while personal…” she trails off.
“Am I a closed book? I don’t know, I feel like I’m not!” Far from it; Nicola Lamb has put her love of pastry plainly on the screen and on the page — consistently — for four years. Her joyful attitude on the subject of making and enjoying baked goods is summed up in her retort to a tabloid headline she recalled from years ago that admonished a British reality star for overindulging in crème anglaise: “Fuck yeah,” Nicola proclaimed. “Let’s drink the custard!”
SIFT is available everywhere books are sold, including Penguin Random House and Bookshop.org.

Photo credit for the portrait of Nicola that appears on the left side of the main page/social image: Suzie Howell
(With my own selfish motive in mind of wishing to emulate this highly productive person, I asked for her full daily routine. Sunday and Monday are her days off; Here is the Tuesday-Saturday routine:
7:15 A.M.:
Alarm
7:15-7:45 A.M:
“Stew in bed for half an hour” (nothing is off limits: social media, e-mails, and WhatsApp are all allowed.
7:45-8:00 A.M.:
Shower, brush teeth, etc.
8:00-8:30 or 9:00 A.M.:
Laundry, “faffing around”
8:30 or 9:00 A.M. to 10:00 A.M.:
Neighborhood walk
10:00-10:30 A.M.:
In the kitchen, “faffing” around on the computer
10:30 A.M.-6:30 P.M.:
In the kitchen, baking, filming, and photographing (Tuesday-Thursday); writing (Friday); newsletter layout (Saturday)
6:30 P.M. on:
Exercise class or dinner with friends)
love nicola so much and so grateful to you for connecting us for the pod. interviewed her the week before last and it was such a pleasure. but loved reading your "interview" with her, as, despite conducting my own, i learned so much!
a lovely interview! such a joy to read about Nicola through your eyes.