Nadiya Hussain
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 14 August 2016
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway is the baker and winner of The Great British Bake Off in 2015, Nadiya Hussain.
One of six children born to Bangladeshi parents in Luton, it was her father - a restaurateur - who encouraged her to cook. Having grown up in a culture where dessert wasn't common, her love of baking was awakened by her Year Ten home economics teacher.
She had an arranged marriage to Abdal in her early twenties and stayed at home to bring up their three children until her husband encouraged her to apply for the Bake Off. She was selected and over 15 million viewers watched her beat her fellow finalists Tamal and Ian.
Since winning Bake Off, Nadiya has been writing a column for the Times Magazine and has published her first cook book. She also has further books and a TV programme in the pipeline.
Producer: Cathy Drysdale.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:03.0 | Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. |
| 0:05.0 | Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Highland Disks from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:09.0 | For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. For more information about the |
| 0:15.0 | information about the program, please visit BBC.co. |
| 0:19.0 | UK slash radio4. Radio 4. My castaway this week is the Great British Bake-Off champion Nardia Hussein. Tens of millions of us watched in awe |
| 0:45.1 | week after week as she conjured culinary magnificence from rough puff, crampat and |
| 0:50.3 | marshmallow icing, wowing judges and viewers alike, with her unique |
| 0:54.4 | recipe of creativity, competence, warmth and wit. A natural both at the |
| 0:59.6 | stove and on screen she has since taken her talents beyond the tent to write weekly for the |
| 1:04.6 | Times, publish her own cookery book and even bake a 90th birthday cake for her |
| 1:09.1 | majesty the Queen. Throughout the ten weeks of relentless judging, this five foot tall hijab-wearing British |
| 1:15.4 | Bangladeshi housewife and mum of three kept her nerve, going on to conquer the |
| 1:19.9 | media and becoming, according to de Brets's one of the UK's 500 most influential people. |
| 1:26.8 | She says simply, although I must admit that baking is my favourite pastime, when I don't |
| 1:31.9 | do that, which is not often, I love to read and write. By |
| 1:35.8 | this I mean I read cookbooks and write recipes, so I never steer too far away from baking |
| 1:41.6 | and cooking. What can I say? I am obsessed. So welcome Nadia. As a nation, |
| 1:46.8 | I think it'd be fair to say we were obsessed with Bake-Off throughout its period of being |
| 1:51.3 | broadcast. 15 million of us, I think it was in the end, watched you get to the final. |
| 1:56.0 | It seemed to be about so much more of course than just baking a nice little cake. |
| 2:01.0 | It seemed towards that final episode that you yourself were |
... |
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