Oral Pleasures
In 2001, both E! and the Style Network began airing Nigella Bites, the first stateside TV outlet for the British sensualist Nigella Lawson. Nigella Feasts finds the hostess up to the same old tricks: She prepares hearty food without fuss; she alternates coy smiles with confidential grins; verbal and voluptuary, she reinvents the double-entendre. This sex bomb is aimed, I think, at housewives. Buford, explaining why the Food Network’s offerings are called “food porn,” insisted, “It’s not erotic … It’s just unreal.” He obviously hadn’t seen Lawson make guacamole.
Or even heard her say “guacamole.” In the first episode of Nigella Feasts, working on a side dish for her cornbread-topped chili con carne, she endowed the word with illicit implications, pronouncing it with the roundest O imaginable, as if the sound itself might ripen the fruit. O, avocados! Having scooped them into a bowl, Lawson first reflected on the succulence of their flesh, then got down to business “massacring the avocados with [her] masher.” She mashed without pity. “Hmm—disturbingly satisfying!” she moaned. You want me to put my chips in that? more…
