Londoner's Diary: Nigella prefers her nosh to be down and dirty

Anti “clean” food: Nigella Lawson
Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images
21 December 2015

With the rise of vegan pop-ups, kale and spiralisers, many chefs are getting on board with the healthy eating trends. But Nigella Lawson, presumably busy soaking her turkey in a bucket as we speak, is having none of it. Forget bone broth, she says. Let them eat cake!

The beloved cook was a guest on this weekend’s episode of American food podcast The Splendid Table and bemoans the dawn of the healthy fads heralded by the Hemsley sisters and food blogger Ella Woodward. “I feel that I sound like I’m getting rabid on this,” she begins. “I don’t like the term ‘clean eating’ or ‘clean food’. I hate the notion that’s implied, that other forms of eating are dirty or shameful. I hate food-shaming. I also think that no one makes a good decision out of negativity. If you make people feel bad about what they eat, it’s just going to compound the issue.”

Lawson has often been criticised for her fondness for butter and cream in, well, everything, but she accepts that one can’t go too crazy. “Obviously I agree that eating real food and not processed food is good and better for one, but I do feel that a lot of clean eating is too restrictive in its approach. There are so many foodstuffs taken out that it becomes a very narrow-minded and almost self-persecuting way of eating... I think food is there to be celebrated. By celebrating food, we celebrate life. If you try and take that away or erode that in any way, then life and oneself are both diminished.”

The Londoner, looking forward to a Christmas of decadence, wholeheartedly agrees, but come January we may be ordering the spiraliser.

***

In a galaxy far, far away — well, America — Star Wars received a priceless plug from Hillary Clinton. Signing off a rather dull Democratic presidential debate on Saturday, she said to the audience: “Thank you, good night, and may the force be with you.” How current for Clinton to acknowledge the new film, The Force Awakens, especially considering director J J Abrams and his wife donated $1 million to her campaign in June. He must think she is a new hope.

Tony Blair misses a perfect moment

Love Actually is all around, but not for Tony Blair. One of the storylines in Richard Curtis’s romcom, a Christmas favourite, involves PM Hugh Grant falling for his tea lady, played by Martine McCutcheon. The film grossed more than £130 million internationally but Blair must not have seen it.

His former speechwriter Philip Collins, now at The Times, recalled arranging a celebrity treat for his then boss. “We got Martine McCutcheon to come in and serve tea,” he tweeted this morning. “He didn’t recognise her... he said thanks for the tea and carried on. We had to say, ‘She’s in that film, the one where you tell America to stick it’.” Must not have made an impression.

Love was all around at Christmas bash

The Londoner loves love. So it was with pleasure that we noted all the types of love on display at LOVE magazine’s Christmas party on Friday at Mayfair club George. Although Tom Sturridge and Sienna Miller, top left, broke up over the summer, there was still an abundance of platonic love between the pair. It was also a delight to see sisterly love in the faces of Cara and Poppy Delevingne, right, and let us not forget the filial love Marley Mackey was exuding for his mother Katie Grand, editor of LOVE, pictured showing off her love of DJ decks with FKA Twigs, bottom left, nor the dipsomaniacal love all present showed for the cocktails. Love it.

Art of a broken heart

Yearning but separated: Jerry Hall and Armand Leroi last year.
Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images

When Jerry Hall began to date Rupert Murdoch, her first relationship after eminent scientist Armand Leroi, right, we sighed with relief. At least with Murdoch, Hall wouldn’t badger us to attend her boyfriend’s book launches — the ex-model tried in vain to sex up a lecture on Leroi’s book The Lagoon, even paying for her friends’ tickets.

Since the break-up, Leroi has kept silent. Why? He’s been channelling his pain into his art collection. In a weekend FT crit of a show of Marzena Pogorzaly’s iceberg photos, Leroi says: “I own three small prints made in an earlier run. One is phallic, one is vulval, the last is a pair of icy buttocks overflown by a white bird. They hang, yearning but separated, side by side on my wall. Most of the others aren’t quite so organic, for the waves and the wind are sculptors without cause but I, as a bachelor, can choose my art as I please.”

A picture (or three) speaks a thousand words.

***

What is a safe space? Charles Moore wonders, in today’s Telegraph. whether you could apply the student definition of a place where opinions aren’t offended and apply it to the old gentleman’s club. Moore reports that the safe space at Brooks’s in St James’s was recently violated. “There was high excitement. Edward Bonham Carter, a financier, was reported to have brought a lady in to lunch, contrary to the rules.” Senior members investigated and found that the guest — “a woman wearing a hat covered with fruit” — was Helena Bonham Carter. The members retreated. They must have seen her performance in Suffragette.

Self-stitched and hitched

Some singletons bemoan their status as the eternal bridesmaid, but what about the dress designer? Jenny Packham has been one of the A-list’s go-to bridal seamstresses for decades, but this weekend she tied the knot herself, marrying long-term boyfriend and business partner Matthew Anderson, pictured.

Packham, who designed one of Elizabeth Hurley’s wedding dresses for her marriage to Arun Nayar and has dressed the Duchess of Cambridge, tied the knot at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Knightsbridge on Saturday. Family and close friends attended the ceremony, before crowds of well-wishers arrived for dinner and dancing in the grand ballroom. Packham, inevitably, wore a dress from her own label, a dove-grey number made of guipure lace. White is so last season.

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