I wonder if you saw any of Nigella Lawson’s delightful Christmas cooking programmes? Normally I avoid cooking programmes because a) they are on in the morning, and watching lunch and dinner food being cooked in the AM makes me rather nauseous, and b) I really really can’t be bothered to spend all that time searching for obscure vegetables, herbs and spices, let alone use a wok and eight saucepans to cook for Jen and I.
However, Nigella’s Christmas shows were different, and it’s not just her Christmas shows, it seems that for some reason I find her cooking show fascinating.
Now you are thinking that it’s because she’s quite saucy, and if you will, just put that to one side because there is more going on here than a Sid Jamesism can explain. I noticed that whilst watching her show, both Jenny and I were transfixed, entranced by what was going on. Fortunately I broke state and realised that what was actually happening was that she was hypnotising us. I then started to pay close attention to her language and tonality, which was very revealing.
You see Nigella uses an incredibly varied vocabulary when cooking. In fact she seems to play down the technique of the food preparation, preferring in fact to talk about the effect of the various ingredients - the flavours and sensations that the food elicits. Her language plays on the senses - a very hypnotic approach as it causes you to “go inside” and simulate those sensations, and as you know if you read this blog, “going inside” is what takes you in to hypnosis, by diverting your attention from external to internal.
This hypnotic talk is reinforced by her wonderful use of adjectives, such as voluptuous, delicious, mesmeric, sumptuous - these words are uniquely represented internally by each of us, so we again have to “go inside” to make sense of the words. Recall the wonderfully hypnotic Marks & Spencers food ads - they are hypnotic in that they change your state of mind and you may find yourself actually smelling or even tasting the food they describe.
And finally I noticed that when describing the sensations of the food she is preparing, Nigella changes her tonality, taking you further in to trance, and I would suspect that she herself is in trance for long periods of time when preparing food, because even on TV it seems second nature to her.
So there you go. This doesn’t explain the entirety of her sauciness however I thought I would share with you my thoughts on some reasons why I find Nigella’s show so alluring.
