大象传媒

She always had a talent for baking.

Despite coming from a family and a culture who weren’t big on baking, Nadiya showed early promise in her GCSE food studies classes at school, and her teacher would give her encouraging words. “My teacher, Mrs Marshall said: ‘you're really good at this, you could really do something with this. You're really creative.’” But Nadiya didn’t think anything of it at the time. “There was negativity towards cooking in our family, because men would come from Bangladesh as immigrants, and they would cook in Indian restaurants. And to them, that wasn't the kind of job that you wanted to do.”

Her conservative parents didn’t allow her to go to university.

“I got my [acceptance] letter, and I said to my mum, I'm planning on going to this university. And my mum didn't think I would do it for real. Then I was three weeks away from moving out, ready to go to university. Everything was sorted. And I said, mum, I'm going to university. And she said, absolutely no way. If you go to university, I'm going to change the locks. You're not allowed to come home.” So Nadiya backed down. “When I accepted defeat, I remember feeling really angry, and I buried myself in work. I got two jobs, worked all the time, and spent hardly any time at home.”

Her husband helped push her into the spotlight.

When she applied to the 2014 series of the Great British Bake Off, Nadiya’s husband told her: “I think you should do this. Your wings were clipped somewhere along the way, but I think it's time for you to fly”. She says: “I think if he hadn't believed in me from the get go, I don't know that I would be here, because it was definitely him who was like, he was the one always pushing and saying, ‘I think you should’. I think he saw something in me that I didn't.”

She doesn’t believe in luck.

Nadiya’s advice to listeners is this: “You're probably really damn good at what you do. You probably work really, really hard. I don't say I'm ‘lucky’ anymore. Luck didn't get me this far. I had to be good at baking. I had to be good at what I do.”

Fame hasn’t always been fun.

Ever since her appearance in the Bake Off, she has often been stopped in the street, which hasn’t been easy for her family. This has sometimes stopped her from leaving the house altogether. “What I've learned is that my kids don't like it. So when I do things, I just don't do it with them. [My daughter] has had quite a few horrible moments where we've been together and people kind of pulled and pushed [us] a little bit.”

She wrote her new cookbook with her son in mind.

Cook Once, Eat Twice is full of recipes and techniques for saving money through batch cooking – perfect for students. “I've always naturally been very frugal in the kitchen, and that's kind of evident in all of my books, but I wanted to write one book that encapsulated all of that in one go,” she said. Her favourite chapter focuses on re-using waste ingredients – including a recipe for banana peel curry. “Delicious!”

She leaves clementine peels on her windowsill.

Nadiya leaves them to dry “until they're really crisp”. Then, “blitz them up and mix them with some sugar.” She uses this clementine sugar in her baking or in hot chocolate, to add a chocolate orange flavour. “My kids just know now. They’ll peel an orange or a clementine, and will ask me: windowsill? And I'm like: yep!”

You can listen to the full interview and more on 大象传媒 Sounds.