Thanks, Kathleen! I'd never actually seen Nigella Lawson in the flesh, and I'm sort of shocked at how sexy she makes this "cooking" of chocolate sauce. And indeed, I love the question you pose: Is this really cooking? Your comment about the peanut butter reminds me of something I first encountered in Laura Shapiro's great book, "Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America." In the 1950s, when companies like Betty Crocker were introducing ready-bake cake mixes in a box, housewives--of course, women are always referred to as housewives in the food lit of the era--soundly rejected them. Why? Because they were too easy. Food companies had already added dried eggs and milk---all a baker needed to do was add water, and presto: cake! But what companies didn't bargain on was how superfluous this made women feel. Even if they weren't actually cooking---even if there was no creativity in the process---they wanted to FEEL like they were cooking. So, Betty Crocker, for one, tweaked their recipes so that a woman would have to add eggs, oil, and water herself. Evidently, we haven't progressed as far as we thought, if Nigella can spend THREE MINUTES showing us how to, essentially, melt chocolate chips in a saucepan.

I was less bothered by the slightly obscured labels on the pints of ice cream than the canning jars of premeasured chips and the absurdly named “pitcherette” (a word that Nigella Lawson did not invent, it seems, but that is so obscure that a Google search returns Kathleen’s marvelous “In Media Res” post as one of the top ten hits). It is too easy, too perfect. It sells us a version of domestic bliss that neither Lawson nor the audience can achieve in real life. I am interested in the potential male viewers. A 2010 Harris poll found that 46% of the men studied claimed to watch cooking shows at least occasionally and food television executives have been trying to sell men on these programs for years. In this clip, the food is sexy, the “cook” is sexy, but perhaps the biggest “turn on” is the illusion of the self-sacrificing wife, a “domestic goddess,” who believes that not serving me my daily dose of imaginary food is a “crisis.” Somewhere between the pantry scene and the “hot, grainy, fudgy sauce,” I forgot that we were making sundaes for guests and assumed it was for me. This, I maintain, is not evidence of my suffering from an extraordinary short attention span but rather part of the fantasy. Note the final scene when she is serving the sundae. She has moved from the kitchen to the dining room but nearly twenty seconds pass before the guests appear on the screen (even though Lawson is talking to them). The peculiar camera work helps prolong the fantasy that I am the lucky man who she has been cooking for.

Sorry to be chiming in a little late to this great discussion; lots of good points made already. I've long been fascinated by this sense of "permission" that Kathleen alludes to: how Nigella somehow makes it OK to raid the fridge alone at night - an activity which in any other circumstance would generally *not* be recommended (and which some may even find to be "disordered", if not just "unhealthy" behaviour). There is a rather sad irony to the fact that the main publicity Nigella is getting these days is as the humiliated and battered wife, after the world has seen pictures of her husband with his hands around her neck. And so it is confirmed that the "domestic goddess" was ever an illusion...