Celeb TV cook Nigella Lawson joins The Great British Baking Show as a judge
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Nigella Lawson is known for her best-selling cookbooks and television appearances.
PHOTO: NIGELLA LAWSON/FACEBOOK
Christine Hauser
The Great British Baking Show announced a new judge on Jan 26: Nigella Lawson, the British author and cooking personality, after the departure of Prue Leith from the reality baking competition series.
“I’m uncharacteristically rather lost for words right now,” Lawson, 66, said in a statement announcing her appointment, calling the show a “national treasure”.
Known as The Great British Bake Off in Britain, it developed into one of the most popular shows on British television after its debut in 2010.
In 2016, the show’s producer, Love Productions, decided to leave the BBC for Channel 4, a rival network, prompting a judge, Mary Berry, and two of the show’s hosts, Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc, to depart. Leith replaced Berry in 2017.
Lawson said it was “daunting” to be following in the footsteps of Leith and Berry.
In January, Leith, 86, said she was stepping away after nine seasons and more than 400 challenges on the show. Lawson joins Paul Hollywood, another judge who remained with the show after it left the BBC, and presenters Noel Fielding and Alison Hammond.
Under the signature tent that serves as the show’s set, bakers compete in challenges for the judges and presenters, pushing the boundaries of baking with unconventional creations.
The show has been credited with changing the way Britain views the cultural range and offerings of baking, and for inspiring home bakers encouraged by the diverse roster of contestants.
Lawson, who was a columnist for The New York Times in the early 2000s, has long been a star of culinary culture, with best-selling cookbooks and television appearances, in a career that has spanned decades.
When How To Eat, the cookbook that helped kick off her culinary career, was published in 1998, it featured ingredients that were not popular at the time, including avocado, pomegranate and quinoa.
In 2020, Lawson demonstrated a recipe from her cookbook Cook, Eat, Repeat on her BBC television show of the same name that included a dish of cauliflower and banana peels, an ingredient traditionally used in Bengali cuisine.
She recently celebrated 25 years of her classic baking book, How To Be A Domestic Goddess. Mr Ian Katz, the chief content officer at Channel 4, said her addition to the show was “the marriage of two great British icons”. NYTIMES
