Three culinary divas find the kitchen too hot to handle

Three weeks ago, “kitchen goddess” Nigella Lawson shocked her fans by admitting that she was an occasional cocaine user. They were surprised because her cool and beautiful public persona was so seemingly perfect that it brooked or betrayed no negative possibilities at all to mar the glacially lovely façade of her signature screen image.

Well, so much for imagined pluperfection! It turns out that Nigella may have had a high-flying culinary career on TV and been adored by many “foodies and goodies,” but her private life was rife with unhappiness, controversy and scandal.

She was married to a top advertising maven who was ostensibly supportive of her endeavors but was actually a major control freak who wasn’t above choking her in public to prove his overly assertive point.

Now that the “other” Nigella has been revealed and exposed, her high-flying career itself is at risk and it isn’t clear if she has what it takes to weather the ongoing “storm surge” that threatens it.

Interestingly and instructively, however, it turns out that Nigella is by no means the first culinary “queen” to get herself in a pretzel bind. Over a decade ago, the dowager empress of them all, Martha Stewart, was similarly brought down to earth with a painful thud when she was found guilty of financial hijinks and low machinations— and ended up in jail to atone for her sins of (literally) financial commission!

Well, all that is in the distant past, and Martha has been forgiven by most of her fans for her monumental lapse and is now flying high on TV once more.

So, if Nigella learns her lesson and plays her “atonement” card right, she should find herself also being forgiven by televiewers in due time as well.

Aside from Martha and Nigella, a third culinary celebrity, Paula Deen, was also cut down to size a couple of months ago when she was accused of making racist remarks that betrayed her less than enlightened views on equality—which must have resulted from her miseducation when she was growing up in the US South.

It’s taken Deen a longer while to recover lost ground but her handlers hope that she’ll eventually get there as well.

Martha, Paula, Nigella—what is it about stellar kitchen divas that make them so prone to criticism and controversy? This perplexing propensity to get into trouble appears to run counter to their warm and nurturing screen image, but it’s definitely something that other female TV chefs and lifestyle program hosts have to take cautionary note of—and make doubly and even triply sure that it doesn’t happen to them!

On the local TV screen, our homegrown cooking divas, like Janice de Belen and Regine Velasquez, appear to be less prone to slipping from the frying pan into the fire (ouch!) because they don’t have “global TV domination” in mind and are quite happy stirring up a modest sizzle than a major, all hell’s-bells-to-the-rescue conflagration!

That caution may not get them in the evening’s breaking news headlines but it enables them and their culinary careers to—live longer!