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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
"Nigella Bites" is, without apology, the most consistently lubricious show on the air.
Apr 18, 2003 | In "Never Say Never Again," Sean Connery's last James Bond outing, he faces a new M (Edward Fox) who is out to transform the double O agents into clean-living paragons of physical purity. In other words, he's the antichrist. Bond finds himself shipped to a health farm where he's expected to purge the toxins from his system and enjoy the revivifying benefits of high colonics and parsley tea. One night, a comely blond dietitian knocks on Bond's door bearing some godawful tray of slop. Bond listens to the bill of fare, and then opens a suitcase carefully stocked with caviar, quail eggs, Russian vodka, and foie gras. The dietitian takes one bite of goose liver, her face crumples in happy surrender, and the rest of her body follows.
This is how I see Nigella Lawson, the English cooking voluptuary who may have been the initiator of more sexual fantasies than anyone her country has produced since Diana Rigg donned leathers to play Emma Peel. For sensualists who, in food and in everything else, prize pleasure in life, Lawson is our superhero -- gorgeous, sexy, professional, supremely confident and licensed to kill the evil -- blandness, sensual deprivation, vegetarianism -- that threatens the good things in life.
In the preface to her "How to Eat" Lawson writes, "In writing this book, I wanted to make food and my slavering passion for it the starting point; for me it was the starting point. I have nothing to declare but my greed." If Lawson had written nothing but that last sentence, she would have won my heart. It's her declaration of ethics, a pledge of allegiance to the pleasure principle, which is the surest and deepest way there is of responding to the Holy Trinity -- food, sex, and art (not necessarily in that order) -- and a stand against the truest Original Sin: guilt.
On the page, the sensual appeal of food is paramount for Lawson. The recipe for "Gussied-up Ice Cream" in her "How to Eat" contains this line "Break 4 ounces of the best, most malevolently dark chocolate you can find ..." Notice the language. Not "sinfully rich" or "glorious" or any of those other words that try so hard to convey sensual excess and still seem refined. Instead we get "malevolently dark," the phrase conveying that this might not be good for you but recognizing that the greatest pleasures often contain an element of danger. It calls to mind John Waters' line about "thanking God I was raised Catholic since sex will be better because it will always be dirty."
Two English girls I knew once told me that no matter how hungry they were, they would always leave food on their plates when a man took them out to dinner; to eat everything, they thought, would make the man think they were gross. Au contraire. In Nigella Lawson's love affair with food and eating, there's no first-date primness. If she couldn't dig in with her fingers, or sigh in mouth-filled delight after her first bite, it wouldn't be a date -- or a meal -- she'd think worth going on.
If her commitment to sensual pleasure comes through on the page, it comes through in spades on her show "Nigella Bites," broadcast in the U.S. on the Style network. Has television ever given us anything more pornographic? It is, without apology, the most consistently lubricious show on the air. In fact, the title tells only part of the story. To be accurate, the program would have to be renamed "Nigella Bites, Caresses, Kneads, Pounds, Pinches, and Licks." The slightly raised eyebrow and ironic gleam in Lawson's brown eyes make it seem she's certainly aware of the sexual nature of some of her remarks. Let's just say that a man watching the show and hearing her praise the "woodiness" and "springiness" of shittake mushrooms couldn't be blamed for suddenly displaying those same characteristics.
But it's not just men who adore Lawson. The most ardent Nigella fans I know are women and they're as turned on by her manner as anyone. (In fact it was my friend Sarah who suggested to me that someone needed to write about Nigella for Salon Sex.) There may be all sorts of psychological and sociological reasons for that, having to do with some women's complicated relations with food and with their own bodies. You could probably write about how the combination of Lawson's ardent love of gastronomic pleasure and her evident comfort with her own full-figured build (she favors fitted tops that emphasize her magnificent bust) and with the drama of her looks -- long brown hair, generous mouth, lively, intelligent eyes -- is all of a piece with the post-feminist commitment to sexual pleasure.
