But she won me over almost immediately by including in her new cookbook a recipe from the late Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking, one of the great books about food, written by someone who would never have been caught throwing a tantrum about a collapsed soufflé someone who, in fact, hated entertaining. This privileged launching pad primed me to hate her. But in England, Lawson is a full-fledged phenomenon: the daughter of a politician and an heiress, a socialite, a beauty with a charming overbite voted in England to be the Third Most Beautiful Woman in the World. For one thing, her cooking show, Nigella Bites, is shown on the Style network (rebroadcast on E!) instead of the frighteningly omnipresent Food Network, which vaults unknown cooks into the celebrity sphere faster than egg whites turn into meringues. Lawson is just short of household-word status here in the colonies. addition, Nigella Lawson, who reminds me of Peter Falk's bumbling Columbo, mucking around in the kitchen, all thumbs and self-deprecation, and then turning out mostly lovely dishes. Now we have Jamie Oliver (the Naked Chef, with his fresh ingredients and sexy lisp) and we have (or rather, had) the Two Fat Ladies with their wacky antics and butter. I was miserable there for entirely other reasons.)īut British cuisine is no longer a joke, no longer a tossup between meat-and-two-veg and the Galloping Gourmet with his slightly suspect recipes. (This last bit is untrue, however my boarding school was excessively glossy and nice. Nigella wants her readers and her viewers to enjoy eating and cooking.Deep down, I still associate British cuisine with boarding school food, perhaps because of some embedded literary tie between Dickensian orphans and institutions where innocent 15-year-olds are made to eat chipped beef on toast. They include Late Breakfasts, Party Food, TV Dinners, Trailer Trash, Big Lunches, Indoor Picnics, and other delights.

They're easy to produce after a busy day at the office, fun to linger over at weekends or to make with the kids, delectable to read about, dreamy to look at and delicious to eat. Some recipes are based on her popular Vogue columns, others are new and different, and all are characteristic of Nigella and the ethos of the TV series - uncomplicated, original, fresh, and perfect for the way we live today. Nigella Bites is a must-have for every viewer and all her fans. How to Eat sold spectacularly on the back of the first unheralded 5-part series. Her first short series on Channel 4 had over 2 million viewers and propelled her from success into stardom. Nigella is now not only the best and most glamorous young home cook in Britain, and a great cookery writer, she's also become a household name.

Nigella lawson bites