Born in London in 1964, Nadia Sawalha is an actor and broadcaster. The daughter of Jordanian-British actor Nadim Sawalha, and the sister of actor Julia Sawalha, Nadia has appeared in EastEnders, The Bill, Casualty and was one of the original Loose Women panellists. The winner of 2007’s Celebrity Masterchef, Nadia has written six cookbooks, and currently hosts The Curly Cooks of Croydon – a series on YouTube and Instagram with her eldest sister, Dina, 62, who is an art and dance teacher.
Nadia
Dina and I were in the south of France when this photo was taken. We thought we would be staying in a flash caravan, but when we got there we realised everyone else’s was stunning, and ours was awful – smelly and hot, with a horrible toilet. We were there for a month! In the end, we went into one of the show caravans to take our holiday photos. As the kitchen was grim, we cooked outside all the time – hence the rotisserie chicken. At least the food was good.
Holidays were always about food. Our family is obsessed with eating. When we were growing up, mum would use these travel coupons to go to France twice a month just so she could buy proper lettuce. She had a big wall of cookery books, and on Sundays would let me and Dina cook whatever we wanted. We made a total mess, but we loved it. Mum is English and Dad is Arabic and there was a lot of socialising in the house. We would always be chopping and cooking.
When we were very small, we had our own language called Salha. It made no sense, but we would pretend to be mums with our baby dolls, and speak to each other in our strange language that nobody else could speak. She was more like my twin than my big sister.
Dina was a prefect, so nobody at school would mess with me, otherwise she’d beat them up. I know she can look very fierce sometimes, but she’s actually very shy. I’m very forward, a show-off really – always the first to say hello and welcome someone in. I think that comes directly from protecting my sister. I rescue her in certain situations. If we’re out together I’ll know when she’s getting tense, because often she’ll look angry. But she’s not.
Growing up in an Arabic family, there was always a lot of entertaining to be done – I remember one year we did a panto and Dina was the back end of a donkey. There was a sense in our family that if you were shy, that meant you were looking for attention. I remember Dad saying, “Shy people are very rude people,” and that stuck in my head as something my sister had to navigate as a little girl. I now have a really shy child and my sister has taught me a lot about how to parent. I totally allow her to retreat rather than coaxing her into being an extrovert.
I’m not sure why, but for a long time I was doing every single BBC daytime show, which meant I was travelling around every godforsaken place in the country most days of the week. Me and Dina split off around then, and she lived in Italy for a bit. But now we see each other every day. She lives next door and our garden gates are always open, so our kids run between the houses. If they don’t like what I am cooking, they go over to see what food Dina is making. Once my stepdaughter was at my house, and said: “You’ve got such an unusual setup here. Your sister came to the window earlier and reached in and got a chicken out of the fridge.”
When I was younger, I was always showing off about Dina. She is so multitalented and makes me laugh, mostly doing impersonations. That can be scary when we are doing an Instagram Live. Not that she is ever mean: she’s so big‑hearted and super smart. I love that people are scared of her, but deep down Dina is the first person to step in and help anyone out.
Dina
Mum found an advert in the Sunday Times for caravans to rent. It claimed these caravans would be “luxury”, but ours was not. It had a rotten window. I brought my boyfriend along, and Nadia – who had come back from the United States the day before – had such bad jet lag. We drove to France and she slept the whole way.
Me and Nadia started cooking when I was about nine. Dad used to go to Smithfield meat market every couple of weeks and come back with a lamb or a side of pork. Him, his uncle and cousins all sat there chopping and bagging up meat; putting it into boxes and into the freezer. The house was also filled with pomegranates and oranges. I once had a friend come round who had never seen a salad. People didn’t eat bowls of salad in the 1970s – you might get a lettuce leaf. On the downside, the constant cooking meant that we stank of garlic at school, which was a bit of a problem.
Me and my sister are very different, but we’re both kind, empathic and generous. I might come across as bossy, but I’m not. I’m quite insecure. Everything that you see of me is pretend. I’m always pretending to be the person that I need to be. When mum used to have people round to the house, she had to give me a week’s warning. While Nadia is good at being sociable, I like to sit in a room by myself. My school reports always said: “Dina must try to put her hand up in lessons.” I always knew the answer, but I didn’t want anyone to look at me. People would ask why I didn’t become an actor like the rest of my family, and I would say: “Because I don’t want to speak!” In the end, I became a teacher, which is ironically the most front-facing job you can have.
The thing I most admire about my sister is her bollocks. Her tenacity. She is really hard-working and thoughtful. Everyone says hello to my sister when she walks down the road, and she always says it back. I love working with her, too. Cooking is just our latest venture: when I was 27, I had my first child, and to make some extra money me and Nadia had a stall on Brick Lane market. We had a few actually – the first was a dinky doughnuts van. That business cost an absolute fortune as we didn’t sell any, we just kept eating doughnuts all day, and were always stinking of oil. We made our own jewellery for a bit, and there was a period when we went into secondhand shops to buy pots, which we’d then paint – and pray that nobody washed them as if they did, they’d be back the next day for a refund. We took a trip to Greece once and bought a load of weird wallets. We didn’t shift many of them back in the UK, but we were very entrepreneurial. Still are!
It’s funny that food ended up being the thing that worked best for us because it’s always been our favourite thing to talk about and do together. It only took us until our 60s to figure it out. Who knows, maybe we’ll get our own caravan one day and do a dinky doughnut popup.
