Will the Real Domestic Goddess Please Stand Up?

Before the ravishing Nigella got dental work, a stylist and started seducing us all with her particular brand of gastroporn on T.V involving deep fried bounty bars and gammon cooked in cherry coca cola, she wrote, I think, the most brilliant encyclopedic book about food and how to cook (and eat) it.




I am going to own up right here to my secret guilty pleasure - I have two copies of this book, one lives on the kitchen dresser and the other on (or very near) my bedside table...

I love this book, I probably know it off by heart such is the extent of my devotion. I like her and I like all her books, I probably just like the one she did before the publishers and T.V producers pounced a bit more....but as Nigella says:

"Enjoying food, enjoying eating, isn't about graduating with honours from the Good Taste university. I'm not interested in pleasing food snobs or purists."

Who am I to argue?

There are those who will argue that the original Domestic Goddess was writing serious books about food and cooking long before Nigella was even a twinkle in her father's eye (Did Nigel Lawson ever have a twinkle in his eye, it's difficult to imagine....) I digress.....Elizabeth David published her first book, Mediterranean Food, in 1950....when olive oil was something you bought at Boots the chemist and Britain was in a post war slump. Can you imagine? Recipes for octopus & bouillabaise when the jaded workers of post-war Britain were coming home to a stew of vegetables covered in white sauce (made with margarine). I think a lot of her appeal was that she was writing of exotic places and exotic flavours...her lifestyle in France, Italy, Egypt and the Greek Islands a whole world away from grey provincial England where bananas were a rarity.

At that time the things she was writing about were totally foreign to the average cook but that didn't hold her back....

I have read somewhere that this was the beginning of the whole 'food pornography' industry - maybe she and Nigella have more in common than it first appears..........s