Watch Her Simmer

Nigella Lawson, the best-selling British cookbook author and television sensation, is leaning over the bread counter at Citarella, one of New York’s iconic food emporiums and a place where the loaves and fishes never stop multiplying.

Earlier, at a less chic store, she was tempted by sugary and brightly packaged American junk treats like Hershey’s candy-coated sprinkles. But here she settles on a fruity focaccia to accompany her back to London. The Oxford-educated daughter of a Tory party stalwart, Lawson was in town for four days to promote her second cookbook and the U.S. debut of her TV show, “Nigella Bites.”

“Can you wrap it for an overnight trip?” she asks, repeating the question, as her posh accent gets in the way. But at Citarella--which began life as a fish market--they’ve seen everything, and the man behind the bread counter soon figures out just how to help this striking, Rubenesque woman.

And really, who wouldn’t want to?

The British, who are not exactly famous for their appreciation of fine food, have responded overwhelmingly to Lawson’s sensuality and intelligence, and to the unaccustomed spectacle of a woman who loves to eat.

If American television viewers miss a few words because of her broad vowels or fail to understand the atavistic lure of mushy peas (a British staple which, in her interpretation, calls for almost a stick of butter, creme fraiche and frozen peas), what does it matter?

“I’m British and you can’t take that out of what I am,” she replies after being asked if she will adjust her show for a U.S. audience. “I think TV is a really an odd thing, but basically people don’t listen to what you’re saying. They like the cut of your jib or not.”

In many ways, you could call her the un-Martha Stewart: inefficient and insouciant, she seems incapable of taking herself too seriously. Even when she is describing the tragic succession of deaths in her immediate family--her mother, sister and husband John Diamond, 47, all died of cancer--she somehow manages to do so with irony.

“I put on about half a stone [seven pounds] the two days after John died,” says the 42-year-old Lawson, who lost her husband a year ago. “It was incredibly annoying. At least you’d think you might get nice and waif-like.”

Lawson’s television show, filmed in the smallish kitchen of her west London townhouse, displays a similarly wry attitude. When she’s not comparing making mayonnaise to reading Henry James, she is arching an eyebrow or offering a sly half-smile. (Apparently, the Brits put irony in their water instead of fluoride.)

In one segment of the program, which airs Saturdays on E! and Style network, after she has finished making that most English of desserts, trifle, the viewer next sees her dressed for bed in a gray satin robe, padding through her darkened kitchen while reading a travel magazine. Opening the refrigerator, she spoons up some of the creamy pudding and happily puts it in her mouth. The screen then goes dark.

“I like cooking food I like eating,” she explains. “I let greed be my guide. I’m not aiming to produce anything in particular.”

And that casually sybaritic approach is what comes across. She’s the first to proclaim she’s not a chef, and that her series is not about restaurant-style cooking. She is not surrounded by dozens of little bowls filled with pre-measured ingredients. In fact, her loyal TV fans, in order to be certain of precise quantities, are pretty much forced to make educated guesses--or else to fork over the cash to buy her actual cookbooks, “How to Eat” and “How to Be a Domestic Goddess.”

She also does not do those intimidating tricks with knives. Rather, she pounds, tears and tosses with her hands. When she needs parsley, she grabs a chunk from a plant on her counter and snips away with scissors. You sense her exhaustion in the kitchen, and her joy.

We also learn a lot about the home life of this now-single mother, whose young widowhood has been the common property of an entire nation, thanks to her celebrity and that of her late husband, a well-known columnist and television journalist. We see her picking up her kids, Cosima, 8, and Bruno, 5, from school or typing at her computer or pawing through her freezer only to turn up a slab of frozen bacon in a Baggie.

She uses only one cameraman and, clearly, he aspires to the artistic. For example, on a rainy afternoon, he frames Lawson alone in a window seat, eating and peering soulfully out at her wet garden. There are frequent romantic, soft-focus shots of her with her children, and the soundtrack aims for authenticity, letting us hear the soft shrrrr of a sauce as it is being whisked.

It’s hard to decide exactly how much of the visual and verbal innuendo is intentional. After all, the linking of food and sex is something long taken for granted. But to see Nigella Lawson licking her fingers is somehow different from watching Julia Child do the same. And her vocabulary of culinary adjectives also seems to be highly coded: a sauce for pasta is described as “voluptuous,” “gooey” and “unctuous.”

When she’s finished making one of her dishes, we see her rubbing her hands together and cooing happily, “Yum, yum.” Hmmm, hmmm?

With a profusion of dark auburn hair cascading around her heart-shaped face, those gorgeous swollen lips, her velvet-pool eyes and all that yum-yumming, Lawson might be dubbed the Queen of Come-On Cooking.

She professes to be appalled that people come away from her show remembering the luscious sensuality of her ample bosom instead of her rich bounty of food. During this interview, she is wearing a deep V-neck black sweater, a long black skirt, suede stiletto boots and pale makeup. Stretched out on the couch in the lobby of her hotel, she resembles nothing so much as a zaftig Jennifer Connelly. Or is it Liv Tyler playing a grown-up Bridget Jones?

“The idea that people might think I’m being coquettish--this makes me sick,” she says. “I always think I’m kind of friendly. I try to speak intimately but not in a kind of boudoir sense but rather in a kind of girl-to-girl girlfriend sense. The idea that it’s meant to be come-hither ... uuhhgg.” She makes a face.

So far the Yank media has fallen all over itself for this imported appetite amazon. She has been portrayed adoringly in print and television interviews. Even the food world has welcomed her. Gourmet called her “England’s It Girl.” And, there are more than 1.5 million copies of her cookbooks in print.

Stardom, Then Backlash

Her fellow countrymen, on the other hand, soon after a poll of British males voted her the third most beautiful woman in the world, began registering a small backlash. Indignant noises about the title of her new baking book, “How to Be a Domestic Goddess” (with its kitschy endpapers of aproned 1950s housewives), first were heard, and then a clutch of women columnists wondered if all her gushing over mushy peas and trifle wasn’t simply a way of luring their sisters back into domestic servitude. Fame, it seems, made the overripe cook ripe for parody.

But Lawson, who sees herself primarily as a journalist, is aggressively self-deprecating and understands what it’s like to come upon such an easy target: “If I had been writing [my own] weekly column still and someone had written ‘How to Be a Domestic Goddess,’ that would have been my column for the week, too.... I respect the need for a subject.”

And she also wishes to set the record straight about whether she is some poster girl for post-feminism: “I feel that in a sense this is probably the first time in women’s history where you can have the option of cooking or not. In fact I’m talking about it as a hobby, really. That you can say, ‘I choose to do this.’ I can indulge this fantasy of a little domestic shimmering because I am not obliged to occupy this role against my will.”

If she has a role model in the kitchen--and perhaps in life--it is her late mother, Vanessa Salmon, an elegant heiress who by all accounts was a beautiful bohemian who, when called upon to do so, could cook wonderfully. Yet when she wasn’t turning out the perfect roast chicken, this maternal goddess was at the center of London’s most charmed social circles.

Lawson’s father Nigel, a former journalist himself, became Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Lawsons had four children before their divorce in 1980. Both remarried. Five years later, when Nigella was 25, her mother died suddenly of liver cancer. Three months before Nigella’s first child was born, her younger sister Thomasina died at 32 of breast cancer.

Lawson says the loss of these women partly explains why food became the center of her professional life: “I started writing about food to continue something that had gone on in my house.”

But there is something else going on in her kitchen. It is very soothing and intensely grounding to watch Lawson in her sneakers and denim jacket separating an egg from palm to palm (never shell-to-shell for fear she’ll pierce the yolk). She’s not about showing off or achieving perfection. For her, the greatest satisfaction--and you really believe her--lies in feeding her kids something simple and delicious like a rich and steamy tomato sauce with meatballs over homemade pasta.

And she’s serious about the If-I-can-do-this-so-can-you attitude that is sometimes the bogus mantra of the TV chef-celebrity. “I think most people are made to disparage home cooking,” she says. “If all they get from me is that they ignore every single recipe I’ve cooked but think they’re going to do something that they want to cook because it’s not fancy and it’s just ordinary food but it’s their version of it, I feel that’s successful.”

A Well-Bred Waitress

For her part, she has done it her way throughout her life. Although she attended the best schools, she was not a brilliant student and switched schools five times before college. Despite her family’s position and connections, she sought sales jobs in London department stores and worked as a waitress. She moved to Florence for a period to learn Italian and supported herself as a chambermaid.

Then, after going on to study modern languages at Oxford, she began a career in publishing, and became deputy literary editor at the Sunday Times. She signed on eventually as restaurant critic for the Spectator but never stopped being, as she put it, a proper journalist, writing on everything from makeup to anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union.

She met John Diamond when she was at the Times, where he was a columnist, and, in one version of their courtship, they married on a whim while vacationing in Venice. As someone who regularly ate her cooking and passed through her kitchen, he was the first to suggest she might have a cookbook in her.

And the truth is, Lawson’s fame--the point at which she became a one-name star a la Diana--came in part because of her husband’s illness. Ever the man of words, he documented his oral cancer in a newspaper column and in a book that was turned into a BBC TV drama, “A Lump in My Throat.” In his last years, unable to eat or speak because his tongue had to be removed, Lawson became his voice.

“It turned me from being a quiet person to a constantly talking person,” she once said.

Yet even talking about the ghastly decline of her husband, Lawson is not morbid. She is instead open, about her own pain or how her kids are coping. She is even able to be relaxed about the voracious public interest in the fact that she has been dating Charles Saatchi, the art collector and advertising mogul, even about the rumors they might marry. “No, no,” she says, and laughs.

She is forging ahead on her own, writing another book due out in the fall and still feeding her kids bacon despite their recent threats to go vegetarian. One of the few things she seems to resent is being reduced to a stereotype, and having others dictate what she should or should not be.

Like, for example, thin.

Of course, she wants to be thinner. She just doesn’t want to have to be one of those emaciated “black trouser-suited New York women.” She is disrespectful, in fact, when it comes to a particularly famous one from the high-end fashion press. “I wouldn’t want to be like that. I find it bloodless. I don’t have the discipline and I don’t have the drive and I am not prepared to go to a gym every day and have lettuce and black coffee.”

Nevertheless, Lawson confesses that before coming to New York for her publicity blitz, she panicked and managed to put on 10 pounds, having stayed in bed eating Toblerone.

“Oh, I just thought, ‘My God, everyone in Manhattan is so skinny I can’t bear it,’” she says, sighing.

Still, she is already vowing to go on a “massive diet of self-denial” once she gets home.

But wait!

Before the Lady of the Larder departs with her focaccia, she orders takeout from one of the best Chinese kitchens in New York. Yum, yum: empty cartons of moo shu pork and orange chicken will litter the room she vacates to catch that redeye back to London.

So there.