Powerpoint: Biting back at Nigella

By MICHELE HEWITSON

What's for dinner, I'd ask, and my mother would always say, "Poison, what do think?" But since you asked, it's pipi chowder. Followed by, let's see, seared salmon steaks with mushy peas, a la Nigella. Then I think we'll have little individual choc puds.

Nothing flash. Just use the best chocolate you can get your foodie fingers on, and do make sure you know where your eggs have come from.

Most of the above menu is tripe — although I approve of the snobberies — except for the chowder. The pipi were cheap up the supermarket and we'll have the chowder with a nice loaf from the local bakery.

Pud? Maybe a scoop of good vanilla ice cream from a local (although not up-the-street local) ice creamery. I'm not giving you brand names. What do think this is? An advertisement posing as a telly food show?

Still, just for a moment there I was suffering from the delusion that I was a domestic goddess.

But I just don't have the time. I'm too busy writing about watching other people cook on the telly. It's compulsive procrastination.

The guilt, though, is threatening to give me indigestion.

I thought we'd got over this. Got over Superwoman with her power aprons, her gifted kids, her high-flying job, her little home-marinated packets of things in the fridge-freezer the size of the Kursk sub and her dinner parties mid-week.

Now there's Nigella. Or, "Repella" as she's known to a mate of mine, who is a very good cook with a very mean mouth. Actually, I'd like Nigella better if she didn't try to do that smiling-out-of-the-side-her-mouth thing while she's tossing back her tresses. I do hate a hair in my couscous. It's so, coarse, somehow.

Such reactions are proof that Nigella does bite, if biting means that this is the latest in television foodie shows which somehow do the opposite of what they are, presumably, intended to do: make us want to cook food.

Jamie Oliver is not presently cooking (or "coo-king", as Nigella likes to coo) on our screens. He is, though, still making cooking look like a buzzy, messy, cool camera-angle thing to do. He's advertising canned stuff here.

If cooking is so sizzlingly sexy (Nigella has been voted the third sexiest woman in the world by, well, who actually?) why don't you see anyone cooking on telly programmes except on telly-cooking programmes?

Nobody eats anything much, scarcely so much as an oyster, on Sex and the City. It doesn't make for comedy either. Seinfeld only ever ate cereal. Sure, he and Elaine et al ate at the diner. Ha. Ever see them eat? Ever see them cook?

No. Because watching people cook is boring. No matter that people can look like a domestic goddess doing it — oh well, the beautiful Nigella in her sexy tight twin set can.

Watching the Two Fat Ladies was not boring because they didn't do a "coo-king" show. They did a food show. And talking about food is endlessly fascinating. Writing about it can be even better.

Try MFK Fisher on potatoes: "Perhaps the most subtle I ever ate were in Sweden right from the garden, on a bed of fresh dill, and then lifted out like fragile eggs. They were almost evanescent, like the upper or lower cheeks of baroque cherubs."

Or Nigel Slater on the sausage: "A cold cooked sausage looks so lonely on its plate in the fridge. Yet finding one waiting for you on your return from the pub is a joy indeed."

This is a television column posing as an advertisement for the joys of reading about food.