Envy, lust and gluttony - the perfect recipe

AS A child she prayed to God to give her a big cleavage.  She craved a “sticky-out bottom and a sticky-out bosom”.

God responded with enthusiasm. On Tuesday night she was pictured leaving the V&A Museum after a party, spilling indecorously out of her evening gown and revealing the full magnificence of her curves and show-stopping embon-point – reportedly a 32G.

Generally speaking, too much cleavage is a look to avoid – unless your name is Nigella Lawson and you are as voluptuous as Botticelli’s Venus. And God didn’t stop there. He also gave the TV chef doe-eyes, raven hair and a good brain.

By rights women should hate her and men should be intimidated by her. But that’s not how it is. Women want to be her; men just want her.

David Cameron is a case in point. He may be happily married to his own elegant, blue-stocking Samantha but on Monday he went quite wibbly at the thought of meeting the domestic goddess.

He spent the previous few minutes earnestly talking Gordon Brown and tax with Fern Britton on ITV’s This Morning but once that was out of the way he revealed what was really on his mind.

Nigella had been booked to plop herself on to the TV sofa after him. Cameron was hopeful he could share it with her.

“Can I stay until Nigella comes on?” the leader of the Conservative Party asked like an over-enthusiastic schoolboy. Fern was having none of it.

“Oh?” she said, with a knowing leer. “I’m a fan of her cooking,” he spluttered.

“Of course you are,” retorted Britton, smoothly. “Her buns.”

Two days later and This Morning’s production crew are still talking about Monday’s star guest.

“We were stunned how petite she was in the flesh and she has the most beautiful skin,” says the show’s editor Anya Francis. Not only that, she was nice, too. “She arrived on time, no diva demands. She’s gorgeous.”

You could call this the Nigella effect. It’s not the first time in the past fortnight that her charisma and appeal has led to rose-scented copy.

Last week she and pop singer Myleene Klass tied for this year’s title of “yummiest mummy”. The poll by CLIC Sargent, the children’s cancer charity, voted the two women equal best at being good mothers while remaining sexy.

A few days earlier Gordon Ramsay’s lovely wife Tana enthused about her husband’s TV rival.

“She is a star, I love her,” the author and presenter of UKTV’s Market Kitchen sighed at a book launch. “She manages to look ravishing in just about anything. I wish I could be more like that.” This is high praise coming from a slender 33-year-old, 15 years younger than her idol.

So what on earth is it about Nigella that leads people to praise her so fulsomely? Those who know her insist that the irritating touch of aloof perfection that comes across in her cookery shows – her latest series, Nigella Express, regularly entertains three million viewers –  doesn’t reflect what she is really like. Significantly, the TV veneer doesn’t reveal her endearingly scatter-brained approach.

For far from being a domestic goddess, she is delectably chaotic.

“I lurch from chaos to chaos. I can’t find my driving licence and my clothes are everywhere – cooking is the neatest thing I do,” she admits.

This we like. “She freaks out because she can’t find the right bra. That flustered haphazardness is appealing,” says Deborah Brett, a contributing editor at Red magazine.

Nigella recalls with relish that when she was dieting she once balanced a recipe book on the treadmill. Its title? Ten Best Cream Cakes. “I am greedy. I always like the thought of eating more,” she declares.

This reputation gave rise to the tongue-in-cheek voyeuristic style in which her TV show is filmed: “Gastro-porn,” as Nigella puts it.

And it is the key to her appeal. Men love her appetite for sex, women love her appetite for food. Together they add up to an appetite for life. It’s refreshing that she hasn’t succumbed to the tyranny of the thin.

“Nigella is not preoccupied with what she’s putting in her mouth,” says party planner Liz Brewer. “She’s happy about what she looks like. She loves her food. Because she’s relaxed her true beauty comes out.”

Men love her because she is classically sexy. “She’s the Jane Russell archetype. She also looks like she’s great fun. A kind of ‘in your boots in the country baking cakes and being silly’ vibe that puts them at their ease,” says Deborah Brett.

Food is so important to Nigella that she never goes out without it. Her handbag is always stuffed with treats. “I need to take food with me everywhere,” she said recently. “I often have a packet of Twiglets in my bag and always Colman’s mustard.”

It was Noel Coward who said that what men wanted was a woman for comfort and a man for pleasure but Liz Brewer insists that Nigella offers a heady combination. “Men love real women,” she says. “No man finds a skinny girl comfortable.”

Nigella, who has been married twice, agrees. Her first husband, the writer John Diamond, died in 2001. Two years later she married art collector, Charles Saatchi.

“What is appealing to men is that mixture of love and mother, someone who will care for you,” she once said. “I’ve never been with a man who thinks skinniness is sexy. It’s important to be with someone who makes you feel madly desirable.”

Phew. You can almost smell the nutmeggy fumes trailing in her wake. Which is not to say that she is without her detractors. Two years ago her weekday TV chat show bombed – typical question: “Do you make muffins?”

The Americans don’t understand her – even after she appeared on the Jay Leno show and the jovial host wrapped his arms around her while they carved a roast together and later declared her to be the sexiest woman he had ever met.

And a recently published government study discovered that her recipes are so elaborately written that they can only be understood by chefs with GCSE-standard reading and numeracy skills.

That’s hardly a surprise. She studied medieval and modern languages at Oxford, is the daughter of Lord Lawson, Margaret Thatcher’s former Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the sister of journalist Dominic Lawson.

She started her career writing book reviews and soon proved herself hugely capable. She married John Diamond, a teacher-turned-journalist, in Venice in 1989 and he was to a large extent her mentor. Back then colleaguesremember her as very serious. He, in contrast, was sociable and brought her out of herself.

From writing about books, Nigella took on a cookery column which grew into a book, then a TV series and more books. Her talent was in presenting food as foreplay and ignoring all the rules: cooking with her tresses near the bowl, dipping her finger in and sucking gleefully. But not everything God gave Nigella was good.

While her star was rising, her private life seemed to involve one tragedy after another. She watched her mother, her sister and Diamond all die young – at 48, 32 and 42, respectively – of cancer. “I used to refer to myself as Typhoid Mary,” she once said. “Anyone I loved I seemed destined to lose.”

When Diamond died leaving her with two small children – Cosima, now 13, and Bruno, 11 – there was a bit of tut-tutting when she took up with Saatchi months after his death.

But even those who thought the speed of her involvement tactless must feel admiration for the way she has emerged from the mill and made a happy second marriage. Which is not to say she doesn’t have worries. She will be 48 in January, the same age as her mother when she died.

“I worry a great deal about the children and what would happen if I die young,” she says. But since she has observed too often the alternative to growing old, ageing naturally holds little fear. “I had a mother who was very grateful to die young so she didn’t have to get old.”

There may be a bittersweet note underlying her success – the fear that she might not live a long life – but Nigella is determined to enjoy every chocolate-studded moment of it.