When Nadiya Hussain won The Great British Bake Off and managed to make the entire country fall in love with her, she also won a wager with her husband, Abdal (now with a fanbase of his own). “If I do well,” Nadiya had said to him when he finally persuaded her to apply for the show (he bought her a purple KitchenAid mixer when she sent off the form), “then I want to move to London to be near my mother and try to make a career out of this. And he said, ‘Make it to the final, win the show and I’ll sell the house,’” she recalls. “And I made it to the final and I won the show. The following day we put the house up for sale and we sold it within seven days.”
Today, Hussain is three weeks away from the removal men arriving at their modest home in Leeds. The family is off to Milton Keynes, not far from Luton, where she was born and raised, one of six (she has three sisters and two brothers) and the only one who “flew far from the nest” when she was introduced to Leeds-based Abdal ten years ago by their fathers (the men had once worked together in an Indian restaurant in Cambridge).
Now, a decade on, after years of happily fulfilling the role of traditional wife – “I think my love of baking was born from watching his face when he walked in the door at the end of the day and saw the cake I’d baked him” – and mother, Hussain’s win is the beginning of a new chapter.
Her kitchen is entirely normal (tempting as it is to imagine the Bake Off creations being born in hi-tech kitchens unlike our own, it’s rarely the case). Apart from the KitchenAid mixer, there are no visible expensive gadgets. Her oven, she tells me, is from Ikea, and was bought by her husband on Bank Holiday Monday between weeks five and six of Bake Off while she sat crying on the stairs after the door of the old oven blew off while she was trying to hone her pastry skills.
“And I sobbed and sobbed, and our car had blown a gasket and we had to phone his brother to take him to the shop and get an electrician to fix it – and we did it all within two hours. My family are the ones who put up with me during all my strops and when I was having a tough time.”
In the hall, there is a storage unit with plastic drawers from floor to head height. She pulls out each drawer. They are jammed with piping bags, clips, pins, cutters, cupcake cases, a glue gun – “Because who doesn’t love a glue gun?” – silicone pads, pots, ribbons, labels … “Bake Off made me like this,” she says.
In one drawer there are pots of sparkling powder, edible glitter and food colourings – it looks like a beautiful make-up tray. Hussain has three children, two sons and a five-year-old daughter. She loves this drawer and sometimes takes it into the kitchen and shouts, “Ready, steady, bake!”, acting out the challenge that faced her mother for ten weeks.
“There was no going to the library, no walking the neighbour’s dog,” says Hussain. “I was basically in the kitchen the whole time. I only left to sleep and go to the toilet and I’d be up at 4am.”
With all the brouhaha of the win – an agent, her own column in this magazine, which starts today, the hoped-for TV show – Hussain has done nothing about the impending move. It’s all been left to Abdal.
“We’re going to wrap this whole unit in clingfilm,” she says looking at it, with its stacked bowls and pans, “and then just put it straight in the van.” It sounds an ambitious plan, given the potential for breakage and catastrophic spillage, but Hussain is entirely relaxed.
Behind us, in the tiny utility area, there are more pans and dishes piled up, mixed with marshmallows (remember her marshmallow fondant on Bake Off?) and popcorn. “First it was on the shelves, then it started spilling out on to the passageway,” she says. ‘“We’re renting the new house and it does have a garage.”
There cannot be many people who have missed the noise and polemic around Hussain’s Bake Off triumph, which turned her into a sort of figurehead for multiculturalism and prompted some BBC bashing in certain quarters for being too politically correct by supposedly scoring points in giving first prize to a Muslim in a headscarf (as if Hussain’s bakes were somehow not enough to have won her the title on their own merit).
“I tried hard not to get too engaged in the politics of the whole thing,” she says. “Somebody said, ‘You have done more for race relations than anyone has done in the past ten years,’ and, actually, that’s not a bad thing, so I’m not going to sit here and say, ‘No, I’m not proud of that.’ Absolutely I am proud of that.
“I am proud that, at whatever level, over however many layers, I seem to have related to stay-at-home mums, wives, mothers, Muslims, Bangladeshis, Lutonians, Yorkshire folk – everyone. I didn’t expect to do that. I thought I’d disappear under the radar, and I am proud to have done that, and the only way I have is because I am just a normal person.”
Here is a young woman, a devout yet modern Muslim. “We pray and fast and are devout and do all the things Muslims do, but for us it’s a mixture of the two [cultures],” she says.
Hussain is a first-generation Bangladeshi born in Luton, who appeared on primetime television, baking a complete range of food (her winning show-stopper was her own version of the “traditional” wedding cake that she hadn’t had in Bangladesh), one week in a headscarf and skinny jeans, and the next in a shalwar kameez. “I mixed the outfits up,” she says.
Her basic baking skills were acquired at school (her mother never baked and used the oven for storage) and the rest she taught herself from books or YouTube. Some recipes (such as cod and clementine) were passed down from her grandmother, but culinary influences have worked in the other direction, too.
Her mother – once a traditional Bangladeshi cook – now cooks curries with salmon and mackerel instead of using frozen Bangladeshi fish, because Hussain and her sisters have encouraged her to experiment with what is readily available.
She and Abdal, she says, until recently because of the move, had a mission statement on the wall about how they were going to bring up their children. One of the statements was “Always be happy”. “So if you are doing something, and you are not happy, then don’t do it. If we are not comfortable or happy doing a certain thing, it should never be forced on our children. There are certain situations you think, ‘Oh, OK, perhaps there might be a certain amount of [cultural] adjusting I need to do,’ but there is no need to put barriers up.
“Yes, my children are Muslim, but that’s not what defines them. They are smart and intelligent and one likes dinosaurs and one likes cars and that’s what defines them – what makes them smile, not what God they pray to or what country their grandad was born in. Those things don’t define them, just like ‘western ways’ sounds absurd to me. They are my ways; they are just the way I am.”
Hussain’s cookbooks line the kitchen windowsill. They have doubled in number since the win and are as eclectic as the baking we saw on the show: Scandinavian baking, Caribbean cooking, vegan, sugar-free – she’s interested in everything. Baking is only part of the picture. (Her children – not Abdal – eat cow’s tongue and fish eyes as well as fish fingers, which Hussain finds hard to resist cold. “God! Don’t you just love a cold fish finger?”)
Her favourite book of all time, she says, running her eyes along the spines, is – wait for it – a very unfamous baking book by the Irish novelist Marian Keyes, who suffered from depression and baked to help herself.
“She is the loveliest human being. I’ve never met her, but I feel I know her,” Hussain says of Keyes (an echo of what many people have said about Nadiya). “I can almost sense her healing in the book. I really love the way it’s not pretentious and it’s simple and it’s got so much in it.”
Her favourite recipe ever is Keyes’ Hug in a Cake, a basic sponge, drenched when still warm with condensed milk, evaporated milk and double cream. Even Hussain – not a cake lover – loves this cake.
As she tells me this, the doorbell rings and a workman comes in to check some door frames in advance of the move. “Having a party?” he asks, looking at the perfect scones and pavlovas on plates on the table (knocked up first thing this morning). Hussain looks at him. “Do you watch the Bake Off?” she asks. “Oh my God!” the man says. “It’s you!”
“Have a scone,” she tells him. “And a pavlova. Want a napkin?”
Bake Off has brought Hussain many rewards, confidence and self-esteem being the most fundamental and tangible. Her slow growth in confidence was what made judge Mary Berry well up at the end of the series and what, in turn, made us all cry when Hussain gave her impassioned acceptance speech about never again placing barriers on herself.
Other benefits have come, too: a potentially very healthy earning power after a decade of relying on her husband; a feeling of being once again in control of her life (even in the brief two years between A levels and marriage when she had her own income, she did two jobs, a medical dispatcher and a PA to a PA, in order to secure a mortgage on the family home rather than see her parents rent); and the ability to make decisions about their family life based equally on her new fledgling career as well as her husband’s. A move back down south means her family will play a bigger part in her life, too. “Even today my sister is out looking at schools for my children,” she says.
Hussain was ready to return to work anyway, she says. If it hadn’t been Bake Off-related, she would maybe have tried to get a job in a school as a teaching assistant. “I’d have even quite liked to be a dinner lady,” she says. “Just the idea of working in a proper kitchen.
“I feel my patience has paid off. When I was in the [Bake Off] tent, my husband took a different role in the house. He was more able in the kitchen, doing more things with the kids, a lot more aware of the routines. For the past ten years, I’ve done the cooking, the cleaning, the school work and he has been out climbing the career ladder and that has worked for us.
“But in terms of putting in, I have definitely put in so much more. So now it’s shifted. I’ll be out a lot more and he’ll be home a lot more, doing the homework and the cooking and the feeding and bedtime stories.
“He has treated me like a princess, literally. I’ve wanted for nothing. Before the word even got to my lips he’d buy me something. Now I want to buy him things, with my own money. I think I’m going to buy him a car. He wants a Range Rover with tinted windows. A man car!”
Hussain tells a story about her own mother that is revealing, both in terms of what was inevitably culturally expected of Hussain as she was growing up and approaching marriageable age, and how she went on to make it work for herself.
“My mother would say, ‘I don’t want my daughters to work in this house. I want them to be little princesses and just be happy not doing housework.’ She would say, ‘One day they will get married and have their own houses and have to do all that work in their own houses, so while they are living with me, can they not just put their feet up and let me look after them?’ ”
It was Hussain’s father, who still works as a waiter in an upmarket spa hotel in Tring, who was adamant that his daughters learn to be in the kitchen, both cooking and being comfortable around knives and equipment. He would say, “What are they going to do when they get to their houses and the husbands say, ‘Well, actually, she can’t even cook!’ ” (Hussain’s father is another hero of her story, jumping in the air on camera through love and pride when it was announced that she had won.)
This domestic expectation was fulfilled by Hussain, married at 20 and with her first child by 21, looking after her husband while he developed his career in IT (he’s transferring offices), baking for him every day because she saw the happiness it brought him when he returned home to her. For all their tradition, these were certainly boundaries that prevented financial independence.
“Oh, my husband!” she says. “He is the best thing that has ever happened to me. The best thing. He is my best friend, my absolute best friend and I am really lucky to be able to say that.”
Getting married at a young age was, she says, for her, a godsend. She wanted to stay at home back then – and now she’s ready not to. “I’m only 30 now and my eldest is 9. I don’t feel too old to do this.”
There has been a lot said about Abdal’s good looks – “I caught him on Twitter the other night reading all the comments” – enhanced all the more by his palpable love for her. Hussain remembers when they were first introduced. “It helped that he was handsome, but he had awful hair, awful! Long and greasy and my dad said, ‘I like him, but there is something about that hair.’
“After we got married, I said to him, ‘You’ve got to do something about it.’ I would straighten it with irons before he went to work and I introduced him to serum and mousse and all those humidity-controlling products. It was only when our son was born and he kept grabbing Abdal’s hair that he finally had it cut off. Nine years ago. There was nothing I didn’t do to try to get rid of that hair.”
Her own hair, always covered in public, is equally difficult to manage. “Long. And curly,” she says with disdain. She says she grows it for four years right down to her bottom and then has it cut off just under her ears and donates it to a charity that makes wigs for cancer patients. “I have no need for my hair,” she says. Right now, it’s shoulder length. She’s halfway through.
Her face is beautiful. She has the most perfect teeth and warm eyes, but her self-esteem took a knock during her years at the coalface of motherhood. It will be three years in January since she started dieting in order to shift three stone. “I went up to 11½ stone,” she says. “For a 5ft frame, that was a lot.
“I just got to the stage where I stopped wearing make-up. I stopped dressing up. I stopped wearing earrings because the babies pulled at my ears. I stopped doing my hair and would just tie it up. And [once] I had been so into fashion and dressing up and looking good.
“At first I was really comfortable and really happy, like, ‘Do I really need to care about this iced bun when I’ve had two already?’ But then I realised, actually, I am not happy and I am overweight. And I thought, ‘I need to do something about it.’ I told myself, ‘If you want to wear nice clothes and make-up again, you need to feel good again’.”
It took her seven months to shift the three stone and when she went on Bake Off she admits she was still slightly obsessed by keeping the weight off, fretting about the odd pound. (“I’ve put on half a stone since Bake Off, but life’s too short to care about that. I feel good.”)
She shifted the excess weight by drinking water, cutting down on her portion sizes and walking five miles before the children woke up and then again after they went to bed. “I’d get up at 5am and I’d pour washing-up liquid on their leftover food so I couldn’t eat it,” she says. “I bought a small pair of jeans that I couldn’t get into and when I finally got into those jeans I thought, ‘God! I’ve done it’.”
It’s a small detail, but it is telling of her determination and a reflection of the spirit and drive behind her Bake Off win. “I remember thinking, ‘Do you know what? I’ve done it.’ Now I can go home and if nothing else happens, I can say to my kids, ‘If you want to do something, just do it’.”
Single-minded, determined? Hussain shakes her head. “My dad calls it stubborn, and I think I am stubborn. When I get an idea that that’s what I want to do, then that’s what I’ll do, and as every week went by, I thought, ‘Do you know what? I can do this.’ And at the very end, I thought, ‘I can win this if I try,’ and I just kept going.”
Shoot credits
Styling: Francesca Mullin
Make-up: Lauren Alice at Mandy Coakley using MAC
Blouse and velvet top, both Mint Velvet (mintvelvet.co.uk); cookie cutter, Wilton (johnlewis.com); scarves, Nadiya’s own