Tuesday 8th February 2022

Nigella’s no-knead black bread requires black onion seeds. As the Gay Mother said, ‘Onion seeds are black.’ So what is a black onion seed? In my cupboard there were none – which was bemusing because I was possessed of a sure and certain faith of them being there. The Maharajah and Robert Nevil must have used up the supply with all their Hindu cooking last Spring. So off I go – shopping for black onion seeds. ‘Where are the black onion seeds?’ I blare in the greengrocer’s. The youth even comes out from behind his screen. Nothing. Something called Nigella seeds are small and black but not black onion seeds. They had those. Besides, surely Nigella wouldn’t call for seeds with her own name in her no-knead black bread? Anyway, she hadn’t. She’d put Black Onion Seeds quite definitely.  So I blast into several more shops. Yes, to Nigella, no to Black Onion. It begins to look as if the whole afternoon will be consumed. In the fourth shop the young woman in attendance offers to undertake ‘research’. She Googleth – and Lo! Nigella seeds and Black Onion Seeds are the same thing – la meme chose. It ought to have been a perfect moment of resolution. But Nigella as well as being Nigella, daughter of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, is a flower, not an onion. If Black Onion Seeds are Onions, how can they be Nigella? But they are. To me, it felt like a brick wall. What’s more, I had some of them in the cupboard all along. The Maharajah must have replaced the previous ones.

I need never have left home.