Bookends

Nigella Lawson is not sexy. She is the sort of woman who women think men think is sexy. No doubt some do: men who watch Top Gear and like all their pleasures to be equally obvious. But more men than you’d credit take one look at Nigella and hit an immediate problem: in spite of her physical charms, how can you fancy someone who so clearly fancies herself?

Assessing any other author on these grounds would be unfair, but they’re the grounds Nigella has chosen. To distinguish herself from Sweary Gordon, Matey Jamie and Psycho Heston, Chesty Lawson plies not so much food porn as porn porn. Even by her standards, though, parts of her latest book (Kitchen: Recipes from the Heart of the Home, Chatto, £26) are invitations to ridicule. Accompanying the recipe for ‘slut’s spaghetti’ is a picture of the author clad only in a silk dressing- gown (red, needless to say). As for the shots of her squeezing white dough out of a piping bag (‘I love the squidgy feel of this’), any editor who’d suggested them to Madonna for her Sex book would have been sacked on the spot for obscenity.

The text itself makes some interesting points – for instance that people talk more freely in the kitchen than any other room of the house – though even here Nigella can cloy. Some lines are smugger than a Pret Passion Fact (‘I couldn’t live in a house without lemons’). The recipes themselves? (You want to judge a modern cookbook on its recipes?) They’re clearly written and easy to follow. The marmalade pudding cake is a winner.