Witty, smart and sexy...writer cooks up a storm on TV

Straits Times 6 .Jun.05 Queen of gastro porn

Forget the Naked Chef. TV chef Nigella Lawson makes cooking look as sexy as a striptease.

By Teo Pau Li. FOOD CORRESPONDENT

BY HER own admission, Nigella Lawson's TV cookshows are like 'gastro-porn'. Onscreen, the British celebrity cook's voluminous dark hair is always loose, untied and gets in the way a little too much.

She habitually licks cream and sauces off her fingers, throws her face skywards and dangles pasta over her open mouth, and, sometimes, leaves a pot to stew and returns in a satin robe to complete the garnishing.
But anyone who watches her with dirt on his mind could do with some detergent.
'I had no thought that the show would be seen as sexual,' she protests over the phone from London. 'I think I was being earthy. I have a certain amount of reserve. I'm certainly not trying to be coquettish or provocative. The thought horrifies me.'
Gastro-porn, she clarifies, refers to the delicious close-ups of food being chopped, cooked, plated and - with an unapologetic appetite that has made her every foodie's heroine in Britain - devoured on the show.
'If you like,' she illustrates with relish, 'I'm the pimp, not the hooker.'
Her messy, yet passionate style of cooking has propelled her to the top ranks of British food evangelists, alongside Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay. But unlike the two, who were successful restaurant chefs before they clinched TV and book deals, Lawson is completely untrained.
A former journalist, she wrote her first cookbook, How To Eat, in 1998, and then How To Be A Domestic Goddess (2000) and Nigella Bites (2001).
In 2001, she launched her TV career with the series Nigella Bites. Since then, she has put out two other books, Forever Summer With Nigella (2002) and Feast (2004).
Privilege and tragedy
IT HAS been an unexpected career for someone born of uppercrust political pedigree, whose childhood ambition was to become a novelist.
The second of four children, her father is Nigel Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, and her mother was Vanessa Salmon, heiress and socialite beauty.
An Oxford graduate of medieval and modern languages, Nigella, 45, rose to the position of deputy literary editor of the British Sunday Times in 1986, and wrote food columns for The Spectator and British Vogue magazine in the 1990s.
Her older brother, Dominic, is the current editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
She defends her lack of formal culinary training with the assertion that 'food is not the province of chefs and caterers'.
'You don't need to be a specialist,' she says in a syrupy, aristocratic tone like a younger, warmer Margaret Thatcher.
'In a sense, specialists know nothing about the real history of food, like how your grandmother cooked, or what food you remember as a child, which is what interests me.
'I would never have gone into food writing if it was just a question of printing a formula of eggs and flour. I love the story of food. I love the social history of food,' she stresses.
Aided in no small part by her covergirl looks - smoky brown eyes, perfect teeth, alabaster skin - she has become a household name in Britain, where some consider her as having stepped into the void left by the late Princess Diana.
Like the princess, Lawson's life is marked by both privilege and tragedy.
By the age of 34, she had lost her mother and younger sister to cancer. In 2001, her first husband, journalist John Diamond - with whom she has two children, now eight and 11 - also died of throat cancer after an agonising four-year battle.
British tabloids have trailed her every move with a mixture of pity, awe and slander, especially in 2003 - just 2 1/2 years after Diamond's death - when she married his friend, multi-millionaire advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, now 62.
No weighing scale
STILL, her audience, which she says is equally male and female, has responded to her persona, which is more brainy Mum than glamourpuss.
'I think they get my point quite a bit, that you can be a perfectly intelligent woman who's interested in the world and in matters outside the home, and yet don't feel it's demeaning to want to cook,' she says.
She thinks she's too old to enjoy being TV cookery's first, and possibly, only, female sex symbol. She doesn't keep newspaper cuttings of herself. She doesn't own a weighing scale. And she can only describe her famously Rubenesque figure as 'a small frame with quite a lot of flesh on it'.
She speaks with a kind of hearty eloquence that comes from maturity and grace.
'I think people worry too much about how they look,' she says. 'The only man who's ever told me to lose weight was a boyfriend I had who turned out to be gay.'
When asked what food she would cook to seduce her husband with, she replies, self-assured and with a giggle: 'If I need to use food to seduce him, I'd be in trouble. I wouldn't want to be with someone who wasn't already mad about me.'
If more women thought like her, there would be more happy women and bankrupt slimming centres around the world, one suspects.
As for opening a restaurant, she says she has no plans to do so as it would take her away from her home in London's posh Belgravia, where she writes, cooks and spends time with her family.

'I do have a secret desire to be a singer though,' she lets on cheekily. 'But unfortunately, my voice is so bad that I've had to mime Happy Birthday songs. So I don't think it's going to happen.'

Her audience might just forgive her anyway.

Nigella Bites is on Discovery Travel & Living (StarHub Channel 16) every Thursday at 8pm. Forever Summer With Nigella follows from June 30 in the same time slot.