Monday night saw Nigella Lawson slinking onto our screens once more for her new series – Nigellissima. Not only is the title grammatically grey, but the recipes don’t sit quite right – a strange hybrid of I-talian and New York stodge. And isn’t that ‘food-porn’ thing getting a bit old, anyway?
Nigella’s husky tones spoke of her time as a chambermaid in Italy: living off Prosecco and falling in love with the food.
That classic Italian dish, the unbaked cheesecake went down well with the cherubic babies poised strategically to improve the feng shui of the set. The show ended with her late-night favourite ‘Eggs in Purgatory’. I couldn’t think of anything worse than eggs boiled in tomatoes, and despite her ranking as one of the sexiest women in the country, even her ‘double-dipping’ couldn’t tempt me. Her steak with Tuscan chips looked nice though.
Putting the off-kilter recipes aside, there were still too many gimmicks in the show ;the perennial seductive sucking of spoons and tottering into her larder in her black stilettos made the show a caricature of itself.
I’m all for a beautiful, curvaceous woman presenting cookery programmes, but isn’t it all getting a bit old now?