Plenty of famous people will admit to liking Marmite on toast. Nigella Lawson went a good deal further and built a pasta dish around it. Her recipe for spaghetti with Marmite, butter and a little pasta water has been quietly dividing the internet for years. She looked at the most polarising jar in Britain and decided it deserved a place at dinner, not just at breakfast.
Does Nigella Lawson like Marmite?
She does, and she cooks with it on purpose. Defending her Marmite spaghetti, Lawson explained that “Marmite offers saltiness and savouriness the way a stock cube might”, which is a cook’s way of saying it is a serious flavour, not a novelty. She has also said she has “never met a child who doesn’t like it”, which is either a bold claim or proof that she keeps better company than the rest of us. Either way, she is firmly on the love side.
Nigella’s Marmite spaghetti
The dish is simple. Cook the spaghetti, melt butter with a generous teaspoon of Marmite and a splash of the starchy pasta water, then toss it all together. Lawson did not invent the idea from nothing: she traces it to the Italian food writer Anna Del Conte, and to the very Italian habit of dressing pasta with little more than butter and a savoury hit. Put Marmite in that role and you get something comforting and salty that sounds wrong and tastes right. It became one of her most argued-over recipes when she shared it again on social media.
Who is Nigella Lawson?
Nigella Lucy Lawson was born on 6 January 1960 in London. Her father is Nigel Lawson, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Margaret Thatcher, and her mother came from the Lyons catering family, so food and public life were both in her background. She read medieval and modern languages at Oxford and worked as a journalist, including at The Spectator and The Sunday Times, before food writing took over.
Nigella Lawson’s books and television
Her 1998 book “How to Eat” sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and “How to Be a Domestic Goddess” in 2000 won her Author of the Year and famously outsold the competition. The television followed, beginning with “Nigella Bites”, and her warm, unfussy, slightly conspiratorial style made her one of the best-loved cooks on British screens. She has sold millions of cookbooks, and from 2026 she joined “The Great British Bake Off” as a judge. Her line throughout has been that cooking should be pleasure, not performance, and if that pleasure occasionally involves a spoonful of Marmite in your pasta, fine.
Nigella Lawson’s notable work at a glance
- How to Eat (1998)
- How to Be a Domestic Goddess (2000)
- Nigella Bites (1999-2001, television)
- Numerous bestselling cookbooks and series across the BBC and Channel 4
- The Great British Bake Off (judge from 2026)
