Nigella on Instagram - a sort of postscript to yesterday Nigel

"Instagram is a visual medium, no less than television, so it’s always going to favour photogenic food, but still, it can make a cook despair."

Nigella Lawson

Nigella is a friend of Nigel's so it's sort of appropriate to turn to her thoughts on Instagram - a visual medium, as she says - if ever there was one. And obviously she eventually succumbed, because this is her Instagram logo - 3.1 million followers - huge. Moreover - I have just thought - Nigella - the brand anyway - is all about good looks - hers.

Nigella is not a professional cook, Nigel was - albeit briefly. I think both of them would consider themselves home cooks (obviously not really true) and indeed Nigella does say:

"I’m at my most comfortable when I just open my fridge and have to wing it. When that works, I know I have not just supper but a recipe."

Elsewhere Nigel says much the same thing. But then the publishing teams step in - the photographer - in both cases it's almost always Jonathan Lovekin, the designer et al. in the hope that we shall all be inspired to make their spur of the moment dishes. Except we are daunted too perhaps. I have to admire those bloggers who make the recipes of the famous and then post the results, however awful they look.

So you could say at least their recipes start out as the kind of thing we might do at home. Ottolenghi and many, many others do not. Ottolenghi, we know, has a whole team of colleagues in his test kitchen working away at recipes for the next book or the next restaurant menu or deli dish, and others do too.

How it looks is important however - whether that be for a book, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or any other online source, because increasingly that's where people go to look for ideas.

"If you want to prettify your food for your feed, you know what to do. It’s what we all do: sprinkle with pomegranate seeds."

says Nigella. As shown here with her recipe for Brussels sprouts with preserved lemons and pomegranate. Although it's not just the pomegranates is it? It's the dish, the casual arrangement of the napkin it sits on, the placement of the bowl of pomegranate seeds, the spoon and the carefully chosen background against which the sprouts sing and the pomegranate seeds glow.

The intent is to inspire us. Does it though?

For myself - yes it does. I guess if I make something mostly because it looked so good, and it turns out to be, at the very least disappointing, even occasionally a disaster then I may well be discouraged - particularly if it's food from the same source over and over again.

And then it's difficult to make some food look good anyway. In her article Nigella talks about the difficulty of photographing brown food, particularly stews:

"When I post a picture of a stew, I feel I have to remind people – who find the messy brownness unappealing – that 1) stews are brown and 2) brown food tastes the best."

It can be done of course as here with her Carbonnade Flamande. Just place a contrasting dish of pasta nearby and lift some of the stew out in a rustic soup ladle, whilst two bay leaves covered in sauce sit nearby.

'A picture is worth a thousand words' they say and a quick and bouncy video on TikTok or Instagram is probably worth even more, particularly if it's delivered by a sassy and pretty young girl, or a hunky guy - not to mention the deliberately sexy Nigella, for so much of her image is based on how she looks.

"That looks like real food Rosemary" said David suddenly as he glanced over to me tapping away here, and the noticing the picture above. Full marks to the photographer and stylists there then. ahe was j reading yesterday's post, so his words are wonderfully apt in the light of what I have been trying to say. And that is what Nigella was sort of saying in her article - which was actually to publicise her book At my Table: a Celebration of Home Cooking. But not the old, tested and tried home cooking - Cooking à la grandmère she called it - for times they are a-changing.

"Instagram is not the only new influence on home cooking in recent years. And by home cooking, I mean, cooking done in the home. ... for me, home cooking isn’t limited to any particular type of food. Cooking, no less than language, is a living thing: it evolves; we evolve. Those of us who cook cannot help but add unfamiliar ingredients, new to us, but part of long-established cooking traditions elsewhere. Our kitchens cannot be fixed in the past."

So yes Instagram heightens the need to make our food look good. It is after all the appearance of the food, that first hits us as it is presented to us - either on a plate, or as a dish plonked in the middle of the table. Smell comes next and finally taste. And knowing what something is supposed to look like even before we begin is a great instigator:

"Where recipes, ingredients, ways of cooking always travelled with people, taking old, slow human time, now we find them instantly online. It’s customary to find fault with the digital over-stimulated, unordered, unedited world, but I love that something that feels village-life traditional, the swapping of recipes from home to home, has been reinvigorated by the internet." NIgella Lawson

But tonight I'm winging it with various leftovers from the fridge. Not looking very appetising at the moment. I'm planning on wrapping them in pastry so that we can't see them, and altering their relatively bland taste with cheese and onions. I'm hoping that the more inviting appearance of pastry will get over the potential blandness of the contents, which may end up looking just brown.

YEARS GONE BY

March 14

2025 - Nothing

2024 - Add as many herbs as you like

2023 - Tomato sauce - musings

2022 - A rubbish soup

2021 - Missing

2020 - Missing

2019 - Nothing

2018 - Game - inspired by a white van

2017 - Is there really a best restaurant in the world?