Food - Bee Wilsonon cooking with eyeliner
"You may not have heard of Nigella in the States," coos CBS.MarketWatch.com, "but over here she's US domestic goddess Martha Stewart to the chic, moneyed, urban masses - dispelling her cooking genius to British Vogue's readers every month."
Her genius is soon to go online. The "dark-haired wife and mother of two", as CBS calls her, is in the process of setting up Nigella.com, a website "which aims to sell everything from scented candles to fresh prawns". This conjures up unfortunate images of sandalwood-perfumed shellfish; but even this might catch on if the lovely Ms Lawson were selling it. The idea of Nigella.com goes beyond food as lifestyle. It is, rather, food as a portal into someone else's existence. Being Nigella Lawson is a game many of us dream of playing. As her business partner, William Miller, comments: "She's what most 25 to 40-year-old women aspire to be, and what men want to be married to."
I am persistently amazed and grateful for Ms Lawson's generosity with her own photographed image. Like a fairy godmother, she sees the dullness of our kitchen lives and transforms them with gorgeous visions of herself roasting chicken wearing Brora cashmere knitwear, gazing into a soup pot through Guerlain-lined eyes, or making biscuits with her children, looking like Sophia Loren-meets-Nefertiti. I am as much a mug for this as anyone else. Making Nigella's pea crostini, I gull myself into thinking that some of the glamour will rub off along with the garlic. Needless to say, it does not. I can fully see the temptation of capitalising on "Nigella the brand", as Miller calls it. Of course I would enjoy gawping at dazzling new pictures of her on the net, and would no doubt eagerly key in my credit card number for her luxury pots and pans, along with thousands of other worshippers. But it wouldn't have much to do with food.
There is another Internet food site currently being set up, as dissimilar from Nigella.com as the smell of fresh bread is from synthetic bakery scent. Nanna Rognvaldardottir is an Icelandic food expert and author of a vast gastronomic reference work, Matarast, whose cover is adorned with wholesome strawberries, not glossy model-shots. She is developing a site that might - amazingly - actually enhance and expand our knowledge and enjoyment of food. There will be a recipe database, consisting initially of several thousand recipes, to be tested and commented on by site-users. On the basis of "bulletin board" requests, more recipes will be formulated and posted. An extensive glossary of food terms will be available, taken from Rognvaldardottir's compendious book.
This Icelandic site is trying to use the capacity of the net to transmit information globally in a very flexible way. Rognvaldardottir wants to include a constantly changing section on seasonal food, with tips on what ingredients are best and when they are cheapest. There will be a national "cuisine of the week", with information and recipes on the cooking of lesser-known countries: Eritrea, say, or Albania. You might read, for example, about the arroz con coco of Colombia. This might set off a comparison with the pilavs of Turkey or the plovs of Armenia. You might then feel curious enough to post a question about the palaw of Central Asia, which in turn could lead you to cook a supper you'd never even heard of when you began. All with the click of a mouse.
As for selling designer goods, Rognvaldardottir's won't be a trading site at all. "I will not be selling people anything," she e-mails me adamantly. "I will not be telling them what to cook, rather how to cook what they want to cook, and I certainly won't be mentioning scented candles even once." Nigella is the stuff of online dreams; but Rognvaldardottir's is the website that may actually help people to eat better, with or without eyeliner.
Nigella.com is under construction
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