Foodie Pseudery (40)
A frankly bizarre interview with Nigella Lawson:
Nigella Lawson bites her bottom lip as she snatches a giant knife off the counter with the stealth of a schoolgirl up to no good. Swiftly, she lops a loop of fabric off her curve-hugging purple dress.
The blade nearly grazes her jugular.
“The microphone got caught in my dress,” she explains, batting her eyelashes coquettishly as if to make amends for doing something naughty.
“I took the impatient and slightly dangerous way out.”
Impatient. Certainly. Dangerous. Perhaps a bit. Add to that larger than life with star wattage that could light the fire under a rocket ship….
…
A hurricane of hips, boobs and hair, the British food babe tosses her head and unwraps her black wool coat. It slinks off her shoulders like a dressing gown, instantly transforming the culinary space into a boudoir and underscoring why she’s famous for making food sexy.
But before getting down to the whisking and sprinkling of cooking Mini Macaroni and Cheese All’Italiana, a recipe from Nigellissima, Lawson sets her famously ample bottom into a chair so a makeup artist can smooth the winter’s kink from her appearance.
Tangerine and Cinnamon 
Interesting to see one of the comments on the full article – “If a man had written this I suspect the howls of outrage from feminists would be heard on the top floor…”
Yes – that is very interesting.
A: I think ‘forward’ is not what I would say. I would say that authentic is a big, big buzz word in cooking. However to be authentic, for me, I have to cook as an English woman who loves Italian food because otherwise it would be deceptive because I will never be Italian–much as I try! So I wanted to discuss how Italian food has influenced me and I wanted to bring it to the food that I cook. Now interestingly, this was translated into Italian and it came out in Italy last fall. And I dare say, I was frightened, but they actually came to me and said, ‘You know, it’s quite liberated us because we are so bound by tradition we can’t make those changes, but if you do then maybe we can play.’ And Italians are so regional–someone from Tuscany is not going to cook like someone does from Sardinia–however, they’re very interested to know how we cook in other parts of the world because the world has changed–we’ve got Internet, television. Mario Batali, the Italian-American chef says [my style of cooking is] Londonese. So it’s that way of treating where I come from as another region of Italy. I think I’ve always been really careful to say when [recipes are] not authentically Italian. And yet some recipes are very authentically Italian to the extent that when on vacation in Italy I go into their kitchens and rummage about and find their old hand-written cookbooks and I take those recipes. So some are totally, authentically Italian and some are authentically mine; a mixture of English and of all the travels I’ve made.