Nigella Lawson is catering for all the senses

British celebrity chef Nigella Lawson.

It's almost impossible to overstate the number of times the adjective "sensuous" has been used in relation to Nigella Lawson. Up there in quantity are also "flirtatious", "luscious" and "sexy". Has a television cook ever diverted so much attention from the food she is televising?

It's a bit strange that she's become known as this temptress of the table. Not only is she mystified by the public perception that she projects coquettishness and that her speech sometimes seems to be comprised wholly of innuendo, but she is not even a cook. She is a writer. She is a former food writer who looks particularly good on television and has a particular way with mozzarella.

At 55, she's lived a full and tragic life. Her sister died young, of cancer, as did her mother and her first husband - the father of her two children, Cosima and Bruno. They were all gone too soon. Food can be viewed many ways, including as an escape: the indulgence of pleasure to help forget about the sharp realities of life. Another way of looking at it is the exact opposite: as an embrace of life.

"I really feel," she says, "that the comfort of cooking - which is, for me, an essential part of life and a major part of [her new book, Simply Nigella] - is really about maximising the pleasures of life, rather than compensating for stresses. For me, both cooking and eating are a way of celebrating life, not cocooning oneself from it."

Both cooking and eating: it's worth remembering that food is this two-sided object. Rarely, if ever, has a television cook done so much eating on camera - pulling long strings of mozzarella from her mouth, popping grapes and olives, eating chocolate cake in her nightie.

Showing somebody eating the meal that has just been prepared has long been a trope of television cooking shows, but never with the incessant sensuousness Lawson brings to it: Cook a bit, eat a bit, eat a bit more, this time in your night clothes, cook a bit more if necessary.

Lawson arrives in New Zealand next month for two charity fundraisers, including a four-and-a-half-hour feast in Auckland, organised by Duco Events, who have worked for two years to get her here.

"If you say 'Nigella', everyone knows exactly who you mean and can picture her," says Duco chief executive Martin Snedden. "She means different things to males and females and we think there will be an attraction for both sexes."

"She means different things"? "Attraction for both sexes"? What does he mean? Sensuousness gets tied up in sex and, because Lawson is attractive, this is an easy conflation to make, but the truth is that regardless of what she looks like, the sensation of eating food is something she is passionate about and something she communicates in print just as well as she does on screen. Sure she's attractive, but she's also good.

Take, for instance, the brief summary she provided Canvas of her upcoming Christmas lunch with her two children at her sister Horatia's house:

"So far I'm contributing my slow-cooked black treacle ham, and the pudding course, which so far includes my Christmas puddini bonbons, star-topped mince pies and brandy butter, and there will no doubt be a batch of Christmas chocolate cookies, too!"

Slow-cooked black treacle ham. The description is a concise act of grace - five words that skip elegantly, like an Olympic diver on the low springboard, before performing a perfect full twisting somersault into a pool of black treacle.

Then comes "puddini". What a word! The mince pies are not just "star-topped" - evocative enough in itself - but star-topped with brandy butter. It's the best-sounding Christmas lunch not yet cooked. You don't need to be at that lunch or to see Lawson eating it to experience the enormous sensual pleasure of it. Her great talent is not cooking, nor eating, but communicating the pleasure of both.

She could probably have done better than "Christmas chocolate cookies".

As a child, she hated mealtimes. "I certainly can't remember having any interest in food, or enjoying anything about eating," she tells Canvas. All she knows is that she grew out of it and now retains a relationship with food that is unsullied by fad eating, which she thinks detracts from the true pleasures of the table.

"I have noticed with friends of mine who have restricted diets - I exclude those who need to follow restrictive diets for health reasons - tend to have an unhealthy relationship with food and themselves. I think balance is what matters."

She doesn't mean we should just eat anything, but that we shouldn't necessarily always think of food in the negative, always crimping and cutting.

Lawson says she adds plenty of positives to her life: walking, yoga, food that "makes my body feel vital and vibrant". She doesn't worry about having the occasional slice of chocolate cake. It's a beautifully simple philosophy.

All good celebrity cooks are passionate about the food they prepare, but generally speaking that food is intricate, involved, sometimes scarcely believable in its complexity. What Lawson has done, particularly with her latest television series, also named Simply Nigella, is to reinvent the way we think about television cooking shows. In doing so, she has suffered vigorous attacks and lampooning, most notably for her avocado on toast recipe.

This is not fair. First, it's a hell of a good recipe, featuring lime juice, dill, chilli flakes, ginger and salt, and second, the show is only partly about food.

"I'm fully aware that avocado toast isn't a recipe," she says, "but it's part of the fabric of my life."

People were up in arms, like, "Next, she'll be telling us how to do eggs on toast", as if that were a bad thing. But maybe that's exactly what we should be taking from Lawson - not difficult recipes, but reminders that life isn't all duck roulade and, more importantly, that it doesn't need to be. Maybe she's not teaching us how to cook so much as she's teaching us how to eat, and - without getting too carried away - suggesting a way we might think about life.

In an interview with the BBC in 2001, she said: "I suppose I do think that awful things can happen at any moment, so while they are not happening you may as well be pleased."

There's something liberating about the idea of watching somebody produce food who doesn't focus on perfection but the pursuit of simple pleasures in a world that's not always delightful.

"I know this makes me sound like an odd child - and perhaps I was - but my favourite food was quite definitely spinach," she says. "My idea of a treat was a big bowl of buttered spinach. I still love it. I don't know if I'd call it my favourite food, though I find it very hard to say what is. At the moment, I'm certainly having a cauliflower moment and I love eating it tossed in spiced oil and roasted.

"I never make fancy food," she says about the cooking she does for friends at home. "Any entertaining I do is very informal. I don't even lay the table, but put out a pile of plates and canisters of cutlery. For me, the food has to be easy, not just in the sense that it is uncomplicated from the cook's point of view, but it needs to be the sort of food that makes people feel cosy and at home in my house."

She's had plenty of dinner party disasters but it's never much bothered her or her friends.

"I've put a chicken in the oven, only to realise an hour later that I hadn't switched it on, but we've had a laugh about that and then I've just made a big bowl of pasta instead."

She's a homebody, she says, who likes nothing more than pottering at home, cooking for her children and their friends, lying on the sofa with a book and chatting.

This focus on the simple life must be an extra-attractive prospect following the harrowing period in 2013 when her then-husband Charles Saatchi grabbed her around the neck in public. They then divorced and her private life was dragged fully into public view in the trial for fraud of two of the couple's personal assistants. The most-headlined revelation was that Lawson used drugs, including marijuana and cocaine, but the picture of her life with Saatchi as a whole was deeply unpleasant. He didn't even like her cooking.

In discussion with philosopher Alain de Botton earlier this year, Lawson revealed she sees the preparation and consumption of food not just as some trivial act but at least on a par with more highly esteemed pursuits of the mind.

"I always thought that writing and cooking were twins," she said, "and reading and eating."

More recently, she said the best book she's read this year is The Little Red Chairs by Edna O'Brien, which she praises for its deftness, economy of style and emotional richness. She cites Jane Austen and Martin Amis as other authors she admires.

Her opinions on books are no joke. After starting out her writing career at 23, producing book reviews and then a restaurant column for The Spectator, she became literary editor at the Sunday Times. Literary life is something she knows well.

At one point during her discussion with de Botton she said she doesn't like the way, while reading, she can sometimes picture the writer sitting back with his hands behind his head, congratulating himself on producing such a fine piece of writing. When he asked her what was the equivalent of that moment when it came to cooking, she said it was when cooking drew too much attention to the cook rather than the food.

Oh, irony of ironies, we might think, watching clips of her appearing to fall in deep and particular love with a wide range of chocolate-based goods and assorted roasted vegetables. But maybe we should think again. If our attention is drawn less to the food than to her, that's not necessarily her fault.

Win: An evening with Nigella

We have two tickets to give away for an evening with Nigella Lawson at the Langham Hotel, 6.30pm, on January 25. Nigella will talk about her business success to help raise funds for charity, and guests will be able to sample New Zealand's finest food and wine.

To enter, go to winwiththeherald.co.nz and use the keyword "Nigella".

Entries close January 3 at 11.59pm. Winners will be announced in Canvas on January 16.