“How to Eat” was written mainly in narrative form, in the tone of the newspaper columnist Ms. Lawson was at the time, the recipes told like stories. Her voice is intimate and chatty — in the midst of telling you how to make “soft and crispy duck,” Ms. Lawson muses about the "industrious intimacy" of cooking with other people, memories of doing so with her sister Thomasina, and how cooking food ahead of time feels like "the bolstering up of a life." There are few cookbooks that might warrant an audiobook version; “How to Eat” was screaming for such treatment.

The book was well ahead of its time, introducing ingredients that have since become ubiquitous in Britain and the United States but were not popular in 1998: avocado, pomegranate, quinoa.

“I remember complaining in the book that no one ate kale anymore,” Ms. Lawson said.

“How to Eat” also marked a step away from technical, chef-written cookbooks and toward a philosophy of cooking that was about pleasing oneself rather than flexing culinary muscles to impress others. “Never worry about what your guests will think of you,” Ms. Lawson wrote. “Just think of the food. What will taste good?

Bee Wilson, the British food writer and a friend of Ms. Lawson’s, described “How to Eat” as revolutionary. “It was the first book to make the case so persuasively that home cooking did not need to apologize for not being restaurant cooking,” Ms. Wilson said. “Suddenly, here was someone saying that a comforting bowl of stew could be better than some cheffy creation designed to impress.”

This attitude has remained a constant in Ms. Lawson’s career, the idea that food should be a joy as much for the cook as for the eater, that recipes are malleable, that status anxiety and guilt and stress are enemies of one of life’s greatest gifts: appetite.

Likewise, she holds neither herself nor the reader to unattainable standards. “Remember, you are not trying to produce the definitive Sunday lunch,” she wrote in the chapter on weekend lunches. “The idea is to make a lunch which you want to eat and can imagine sitting down to do so without bursting into tears.”

But it is Ms. Lawson’s voice, said Ms. Wilson, that elevates the book. “The greatest draw of her recipes, apart from the fact that they taste wonderful, is in how she writes, and how she makes us feel in the kitchen,” she said.