In her fashionably appointed home, Nigella Lawson is taking us through some Polaroid snaps of a recent holiday to Thailand. This is a plate of noodles, this is a bad hair day, and this stall of radishes is what inspired an obsession with pink and green food, the very loose premise of the opening episode of Simply Nigella (Monday, 8.30pm, BBC2). Bang on form, Nigella will drip, drape, spritz and strew, dunking pink ribs in “scant liquid” and enticing macerated onions to surrender a hue of “beautiful, lambent puce”. From anyone else this sort of chatter would be intolerable, but this is our Nige, radiant goddess of hearth and home, and I will physically fight anyone who speaks against her.
In Simply Nigella, we’re told, she cooks for family, friends and happiness, which TBH I thought was the basis for all Nigella cookery shows. If anyone can do without a gimmick, though, it’s her. She herself is the hook, the line, the bait and the tasteful beach barbecue, lit by 4,000 tealights and artfully styled to look like a Zara Home shoot. Nigella, she tells us, has settled into where she is in her life. Could this be hinting at her personal troubles? Nigella is far too graceful and much, much too dignified to bring up something so inelegant. I’m not. This is her first cookery show (lets skim over The Taste, it’s for the best) since her name was dragged through the mud two years ago.
Nigella, I’m pleased to say, is now thriving in a new kitchen, which incidentally is glaring fuchsia. Listen, when you’ve been through the wringer as much as Nigella, you’ve earned the right to make some questionable interior decor choices. If Nigella wants a bright pink kitchen she can have it. I always imagined that lumpen troll she was wed to – I forget his name, it’s not important – casting a disparaging eye over her pantry fairy lights, which for your information mister, are the envy of millions and responsible for many strings of greasy Argos LEDs dangerously tangled up in the toaster wire, thank you very much. There was never any doubt she’d come out on top.
I’ve got very little time for those people who greedily rubbed their thighs as they found some sense of tragic poetry in the domestic goddess having a difficult home life. Nigella isn’t the first woman in the public eye to be – maybe not defined – but heavily contextualised by something done to her by a squirming maggot of a man. Revenge, so I’m told, is a dish best served draped with beautiful, lambent puce-coloured onions. At her breakfast table, having nipped out to her local artisan bakery for a loaf of German dinkelbrot, Nigella, with the help of an avocado, fashions it into some avocado toast. This, she admits, isn’t a recipe. It’s really not. It’s mushing some avocado on to a bit of toast, but let’s not burden ourselves with needless quibbles. Most of us will make exactly none of Nigella’s recipes; the apricot cake, the sticky lamb ribs, the, er, cinnamon prawns – these are all filler. The only time I assemble breakfast is if the sausage has fallen out of my McMuffin.
What Nigella’s fragrant lifestyle nudges you towards is fantasy. Like a soft, bosomy gourmand scratchcard, you are buying the fleeting dream that your life too can be as beautiful as that of Our Lady of the Bouji Deli, flitting around west London indulgently popping a truffle into her gob or dreamily reminiscing about some spaghetti she had once. Those allegations, for what it’s worth – the ones about Nigella’s special herb rack – fit nicely into this lil vignette. You want happiness for the people you love, and if, after a hard day sampling cheeses and gleaming in front of a MacBook Pro, Nigella were to wind down with a large Paddington parsnip and some baked goods, well, it’s no bother to me.
Nigella floats, unruffled, above all this grubbiness. Episode two features her pummelling seven shades of puce out of some chicken breasts with a rolling pin. An act that is disturbingly gratifying, she says serenely, with a knowing smile.
