Last week, on her new show The Taste, it was business as usual for Nigella Lawson.
Poured into a va-va-voom blue dress and wearing the biggest, fluffiest pair of false eyelashes seen on global television since Miss Piggy in her pomp, this new Nigella is primped, tweaked, ready for her close-up and hoping to put the horrors of the past seven months behind her.
After the strife, the strangle, the intimate terrorism, the divorce, the bullying, the court case, the ‘Higella’ drug allegations, the awful things said or left unsaid and the haunting mortification of it all, are the sun-lit uplands of celebrity once more in sight for the scandal-strewn stew-basher?
As she says towards the end of the first episode of The Taste: “I can see victory ahead, but I don’t like to jinx everything.” Indeed.
Still, it might be slightly embarrassing that the opening credits of The Taste are etched out in a fine powder — but at least it is cocoa and not cocaine. In this brand new series, the domestic goddess reinvents herself as a judge in a ten-part reality cooking contest that is equal parts MasterChef and The Voice, with a dash of Great British Bake Off thrown in for good measure.
Nigella has already appeared in the American version of the show, alongside her fellow judges: French chef Ludo Lefebvre and the maverick chef, television presenter and author Anthony Bourdain.
During a trailer for the show, Nigella — very much in the chief judge, bossy head girl mode — describes Bourdain as the “ultimate cool dude”, someone who is “very knowledgeable about food”. And French chef Ludo, whose restaurants in Los Angeles are among the most celebrated in the city? According to Nigella, who is billed as a “culinary superstar” herself, he makes “absolutely the best food I have ever eaten in my life”.
In The Taste, 25 cooks compete for 12 places to be mentored by the three judges over the coming weeks. They are given one hour in which to cook whatever they want, and the judges consider their effort on one single spoon, which they taste blind. “My life is in this spoon,” whimper the contestants. “This spoon is the most important spoon of my life,” they cry.
Just like the judges on The Voice, who listen to the singers perform but do not see them, there is supposed to be extra honour and merit in the fact that Nigella and Co do not know who has cooked what. Yet can someone’s culinary skill really be measured by a single, isolated spoonful? Surely that would be like appraising the merits of an opera by a single aria, or a football match by a solitary goal.
Yet tomorrow night, we will see the trio diligently munch through 25 different spoons featuring pan-fried this, herb-crusted that, as they savour triumphs and disasters among the sausage risottos and the pickled beetroots.
They talk about “balance” an awful lot — about “perfect balance” and spoons being “properly balanced”. And sometimes after that there is not much more to say.
“You sliced your duck so beautifully,” Nigella tells one contestant. Later, she leaves her seat to comfort rather brusquely an 18-year-old who cries at her criticism.
“I can’t bear that for him,” she says, when he has exited stage left in tears.
“He has to toughen the **** up,” says Bourdain.
“He is just a child,” says Nigella.
What is interesting is that The Taste reveals a very different side to sex strumpet Nigella, who celebrated her 54th birthday this week. Yes, of course she still smoulders like a burnt pot — it would be impossible for her not to. And there are plenty of close-ups of her lips, which are as glazed and pink as festive hams. No change there.
However, the slurping, pouting, finger-lickin’ parsnip molester of yesteryear has been replaced by someone sharper, determined to be taken seriously, someone who is less camp and much flintier. “Stop sucking up,” she snaps at Ludo at one point. Elsewhere, she tells him: “Don’t suck all the energy from the room, please.”
Get her. Yet after the non-stop campery of her cooking shows, one suspects that this is the real Nigella — or at least nearer the real deal than her cartoon cooking vamp ever was, forever drooling over her chocolate sauce and fetishing about Christmas.
Certainly, recent revelations about the reality of her home life — it was said that she never decorated her own tree, rarely entertained at home, never made a mince pie — have made many fans look askance at her creatively imagined persona.
No doubt she will be hoping that The Taste is the show that will make, rather than break, the rest of her career, hopefully paving a safe route forwards and onwards from the damaging warfare of recent times. Fingers crossed, things are looking good. A tightly controlled PR operation has shielded Nigella from the immediate impact of the more unpleasant and shocking allegations made by her ex-husband Charles Saatchi and her former assistants, the Grillo sisters.
Nigella has publicly confessed to taking drugs in front of her children, stated her shame, laid bare the torments of her marriage, eaten a lot of compensatory chocolate and moved on.
One can’t help but think that if a sink-estate mother had admitted similar family-friendly drug abuse that the authorities might have come a-calling, but Nigella seems to have breasted this tape of shame with aplomb.
Famous and popular, brave and beautiful, it seems that a different set of rules applies to someone like her. Nigella has played a blinder — so much so that her book sales have gone up, not down, proving that there is no shame in public disgrace any more.
Meanwhile, on The Taste, Nigella and her fellow judges are searching for the cook who makes the best-tasting food in Britain — but are they really? Increasingly, such reality shows and celebrations of craft are merely star vehicles for the judges, not a quest for the best or an effort to improve the circumstances of the competitors.
Does Kirstie Allsopp really care if viewers save money by making Christmas pom-poms or not? Is Gordon Ramsay bothered about the restaurants in the back of beyond he tries to salvage on his shows? Does our Nigella care, really care, about the spoonfuls of seafood served up to her in The Taste?
“I thought your prawn was so succulent,” she says, batting her mega-lashes, as Anthony Bourdain urges viewers not to underrate her competitive nature.
“There is an iron fist beneath that velvet glove,” he warns.
Still, Taste bosses will be disappointed that viewing figures for the premiere of the second series, which has just been broadcast in America, are down 43 per cent on last year’s launch, with an average of 4.4 million viewers.
The US version of The Taste is struggling — and sometimes I am not surprised. Often when judging, Nigella would talk with her mouth full.
“Someone’s done a dessert,” she slobbered at one point, her gob crammed with chocolate pate. Her table manners appear to have improved in the British version, but she still torments Ludo.
In one Valentine’s Day special in America, the judges drank backstage while discussing “sexy food”.
Nigella lounged across a chair, her dress — designed by Mick Jagger’s better half, L’Wren Scott — seductively slipping off one shoulder. Chef Ludo was explaining that for him, erotic food had to be delicate.
“What’s sexy about delicate?” said Nigella.
“You mean, you want a guy to take you like, hard, and not be gentle with you?” said Ludo.
“Yes,” replied Nigella, then downed her glass of champagne in one.
That’s what we expected from the Nigella of old — but what of the future here? In the US version of the show, contestants vie to win £60,000 (Dh361,000) prize money. What do they win here? I am not entirely sure. Except the opportunity to make a fleeting appearance in the long- running show called The Extraordinary Life Of Nigella Lawson.
