Sometime in early winter of 2022 – in a blue period of my life – I began watching a series of cooking videos posted to Instagram by the model/actress/singer Gabbriette Bechtel, who is famous enough now that we know her only by her first name. I liked her videos because her food looked beautiful and satiating and I wanted to replicate it. Each of Gabbriette’s cooking videos begins the same way: with her saying ‘I made a…’ and then explaining the recipe to the camera. The food she cooks is oily and herby and vibrant, high in protein and fat but low in carbs and grains (she is gluten intolerant): a nicoise salad, a herby roast chook, melon and burrata and prosciutto stacked in a mound. Part of the appeal of her videos can also be attributed to a certain aspirational quality, an element of status signalling. The ingredients Gabbriette uses are what we might call ‘luxury food’ items: Fish Wife tinned fish, albacore tuna, caviar, guanciale, saba, scallops. And there is also the aspirational appeal of Gabbriette herself. She’s a hot, skinny girl, with great taste in clothes and a sexy, low voice – cool and detached, almost to the point of seeming slightly disembodied. Of course, there are lots of hot girls on Instagram propping up an iPhone camera and filming themselves cooking – Nara Smith, Sydney Lynn Carlson (fake Gabbriette). And if you look a little further back, at the pre-influencer recent history of attractive women cooking in front of a camera, there is no star that shines brighter in my mind, than Nigella Lawson.
In the late nineteen-nineties, encouraged and emboldened by her doting and supportive husband John Diamond, Nigella Lawson released the cheekily-titled cookbook How to Eat (1998). Nigella was not a chef but a food writer – she had worked as the restaurant critic at the Times for twelve years prior to the release of her book. Her ‘qualification,’ she writes in the preface for How to Eat, is ‘as an eater.’ Conversational and wonderfully written, How to Eat was an instant bestseller and soon followed-up with a similarly personal and chatty Channel 4 television series entitled Nigella Bites. But her early ascension to fame was also marred by tragedy. While her television series was being filmed, Nigella’s beloved husband John was diagnosed with throat cancer, which necessitated the removal of his tongue. In 2001, very sadly, John passed away.
Nigella Bites was my introduction to the world of Nigella and I suppose in many ways my attachment to it is a nostalgic one. I have a handful of vague, warm memories of the show playing ambiently in the background after dinner when I was very young, around the time I was instructed to go to bed. I have clearer memories of watching it happily with my mum a few years later – perhaps when I was nine or ten – deciding which recipes we would want to eat and which ones we wouldn’t. Nigella Bites (which is available to watch on Youtube) remains my favourite of all the pieces of Nigella media and has provided consistent comfort to me ever since.
Despite a shared love of expensive and oily food, in vibe and appearance, Nigella is in many ways diametrically opposed to Gabbriette. Nigella is incredibly warm, overflowing with upbeat energy. She is gorgeous in a classic bombshell kind of way; she is hour-glassesque. I love her style in the early seasons of Nigella Bites. She wears matching little pink wool cardigan sets, red v-neck sweaters, pencil skirts, denim jackets. It’s a little secretarial, in the vein of Mad Men’s Joan Hollaway but also practical and maternal without feeling matronly. Unlike Martha Stewart, who is perfectionistic and uptight, Nigella’s cooking style is messy and almost a little manic; she throws pans about the place, spills things, licks her fingers and puts piping hot food in her mouth because she cannot wait to eat it. Her sex appeal is well documented (and obvious). When I mention my love of Nigella to men, they often get this milky, glazed-over look in their eyes, as if they might start drooling. When I saw Nigella interviewed by Matt “Cravat” Preston last year, he, also, was drooling over her. Her sex appeal has also been (cruelly) mocked, a reminder of the (misogynistic) threat that overt female sexuality can reduce us to clowns, make us spectacles to be mocked. Nigella’s persona carries genuine eroticism, the kind of eroticism that arrives when we sense someone can truly surrender to pleasure and is capable of indulgence in the extreme. Nigella actually articulated this idea quite directly in an interview with the Daily Express in 2007. She said: ‘I do think that women who spend all their lives on a diet probably have a miserable sex life: if your body is the enemy, how can you relax and take pleasure? Everything is about control, rather than relaxing, about holding everything in.’
What also distinguishes Nigella from say Jamie Oliver or Martha Stewart or god forbid Gordon Ramsay is, in my mind, her erudition. She writes – and speaks – incredibly beautifully. Much of the delight of watching Nigella Bites (or any other of her television programmes) is sparked by witnessing how articulate Nigella is, how beautifully she speaks. While squeezing the juice from a lemon, she says, ‘I quite like this ritual disembowelling’. In the foreword of a recent edition of How to Eat, Jeanette Winterson quotes another particularly charming line of Nigella’s – her instructions for making a trifle: ‘when I say proper, I mean proper: lots of sponge, lots of jam, lots of custard and lots of cream. A degree of vulgarity is requisite.’ My favourite piece of Nigella’s writing comes from the introduction to this recipe for a Lemon Polenta Cake, shown to me by a colleague a few years ago.
It would be logical to chalk Nigella’s writing chops up to her career as a journalist and her love of reading. She regularly posts book recommendations on her Instagram account, recently reminding her followers of her love of Helen Garner. It would be cynical to attribute her eloquence to her expensive education. I would say that Nigella’s particular style of writing – florid, ornate, beautiful, at times a little indulgent – is an extension of her particular aptitude for creating and indulging pleasure. All of it – the messiness, the warmth, the chaos, the greed, the beauty, the eloquence, the indulgence – seem to me to be somehow connected.
Further reading
How to Eat (2014 edition) by Nigella Lawson
Nigella Bites, hosted by Nigella Lawson
‘Nigella Shops’ in The New Yorker
‘A Spoonful of Seduction’ by Judy Bachrach in Vanity Fair (2002)
‘The Promises Martha Stewart Made – And Why We Wanted by Believe Them’ by Joan Didion, in The New Yorker
Gabbriette on Instagram
erewhon hauls, ozempic, and chefluencers by Mina Le (video essay)
I totally relate to (early) Nigellas appeal - she seemed so fresh and relaxed in front of the camera - and yes a degree of vulgarity is requisite! Thank you!
ahhhh, potentially my fav pp column ever?? bravo