Food always has to be more than just fuel. It is what brings us together with our memories.
—Nigella Lawson (Food Network Canada 2012)
Surely you know Nigella Lawson: the domestic goddess, the queen of food porn. She’s been appearing in kitchens around the world since the 1998 release of her first cookbook, How to Eat and in living rooms (or wherever your television set might be) since Nigella Bites first aired in 1999. She has since gone on to star in a string of her own cooking show series and specials, as well as guest judge appearances on the culinary game shows like Iron Chef America. A beautiful, voluptuous woman with flawless skin, lush brunette hair, an inviting smile, and an hypnotically mellifluous voice, Nigella is known more for her casual approach to cooking, her passion for food and entertaining, and, especially, her cordial and sensual persona than she is for her actual recipes.
I’ve just watched a handful of excerpts from Nigella Express, a series in which she shares time-saving meal preparation tips while making simple, elegant meals. I am, to be frank, emotionally tingly, more than a bit hungry, yet strangely satisfied. Like James Brown, I feel good. This is what Nigella does: she turns me on. In truth, it’s not Nigella herself that does this, nor necessarily the food she prepares (although I could go for some breakfast bruschetta about now). It’s the show as an entire package, the whole enchilada, as it were. Nigella’s personality, the food she prepares, and the production values of her series blend into this whole that wakens my emotions and rouses my senses.
Take, for example, the segment above in which she prepares peanut butter chocolate fudge sundaes for some unexpected guests. Nigella is in her (presumably) home kitchen, a spacious and well-appointed space, radiant with (so it appears) natural light. It’s a luxurious yet comfortable place to cook. She speaks directly to the camera — that is, to her audience, to us — making unabashed eye contact, her smile forthright and genuine. Her dialogue is liberally freckled with adjectives that roll lusciously out of her mouth and into our ears: sensation, delectable, universally irresistable. Really, how can you not be seduced by this description:
You’ve got the cool, smooth ice cream, the hot, grainy, fudgy sauce, then later — which I love — you’ve got some crunch with some salted peanuts. And the thing about that as well, the constrast of the sweet sweet sauce and the salty dry roasted peanuts is perfect.
Nigella casually scoops, glops, and sprinkles ingredients into her saucepan without the use of a measuring cup. This provides such immediacy for me as a viewer, a sort of instant gratification, but it also indicates the sense of ‘knowing’ that Nigella has, a kind of culinary equivalent to the photographer’s sense of ‘the decisive moment.’ As she works, the camera captures close-ups: we watch as the condensed milk glides silky and sensuous into a bowl; chocolate discs rain down on top of it and, for a moment, we see the lovely the contrast of rich brown on ivory. The intimacy of this experience is only heightened by the attentive sound editing, which could almost be described as a venture in culinary acoustemology. Extraneous background noise is deliberately stripped away, leaving Nigella’s posh, crisp voice punctuated only by the clattering of chocolate discs, the slurp of water to thin the sauce, the clink of the three tubs of ice cream she places on the counter.
It is really, quite amazingly, a “union of the senses” (Sutton 2010:218), a synesthetic experience orchestrated by the careful collusion of sight, sound, and personality. “Our eyes let us ‘taste’ food at a distance by activating the sense memories of taste and smell” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett in Sutton 2010:218). Despite the glass ‘wall,’ the time delay, and the thousands of miles separating Nigella’s kitchen from my office, her descriptions of the texture, temperature, flavour, and (in excerpts other than this one) scents of foods move me to autonomically savour whatever she might be making in my imagination.
I would also propose that this synesthetic response is abetted by the way that Nigella builds intimacy with us. Two devices, in particular, prompt us to think of her food as our food. First, she allows us to tag along as she shops, does laundry, puts on her make-up, walks her daughter to school. Second, she speaks to us not only about food, but also of her personal life, especially cherished memories. For example, she frequently associates a recipe, a single ingredient, or a cooking implement with some fond distant memory. In the sundae episode, she admits her fondness for condensed milk as her mother gave tubes of it to her and her siblings as a treat when they were young. In “Crepes Suzette,” she recalls childhood visits to tony hotel restaurants with her granny and the drama of watching a flambéed dessert prepared at their tableside.
It is remarkable to me that Nigella doesn’t seem to nibble, sample, or taste-test her way through her episodes. (I can’t imagine the restraint that must take.) However, at least once an episode, we find her sharing a dish with family and friends. There is a sense of spectacle to even the simplest of these meals. There is gentle teasing of her guests in “Peanut Butter Chocolate Fudge Sundae,” especially of the man who doubts the salty/sweet combination she proffers. In “Curry in a Hurry,” her family gathers around the table for lunch and friendly conversation. In another episode, she and her girlfriends gather in her living room for drinks, laughter, and Asian lamb salad. Sutton (2010) proposes that sensory experience is not passively received by an individual but is instead created through the encounters people have with one another. If this is so, when Nigella breaks bread with her friends and family, they share a sensory experience — and Nigella brings us into that sensory experience by inviting us into her broadcasts.
Of her breakfast bruschetta, Nigella admits that the meal may not receive full stars from a nutritionist, but that food is more than fuel. It is also meant to bring pleasure, that a bit of indulgence is necessary. It’s this attitude that has perhaps fed her detractors who inevitably comment on her figure, her sensuality, her penchant for midnight snacks. The foods communities eat and how they prepared them have historically been used to assess both their morals and their class standing (Sutton 2010). Consequently, a part of me can’t help but wonder if these criticisms of Nigella might not constitute some kind of moral judgement, as though to say, she is a woman of appetites, enjoy but beware.
References
Sutton, David E.
2010 Food and the Senses. Annual Review of Anthropology 39:209–223.
Food Network Canada
2012 Nigella Bites. Accessed November 13, 2013.
Making Senses 