When you’re a TV chef and author like Nigella Lawson, it’s almost a given that you know how to let the audience experience the food from the screen with her shows like Nigella Kitchen and Simply Nigella. She knows how to draw people in, not just with the visuals, but also how she describes food. (She has her Modern Language background and love for literature to thank for that.)
This also includes Nigella’s first trip to the Philippines to represent Contadina by Del Monte. Before the brand’s official launch, she set out to taste the local delicacies in restaurants and even humble homes, as well as visit the market.
“I wanted to see the produce. I want to be out and about with the food and the people as much as possible, and it’s really a pleasure,” Nigella says.
According to her, she has tried sinigang, menudo, pancit palabok, and sisig in the past few days. But what has really stuck to her was adobo, which she’s been “obsessed with even before I got here.” And she got to taste four different kinds, as well.
Marion’s sublime Sinigang #filipinofood 🇵🇭
A photo posted by Nigella (@nigellalawson) on Sep 4, 2016 at 9:57pm PDT
With all the dishes that she’s tried so far, Nigella picked up on distinctive flavor profiles found in Filipino cuisine, and would like to experiment on them in her own kitchen. “What I like an awful lot is the sourness of some of the dishes. I like the fact that it hit that wonderful marriage of salt and vinegar like in adobo,” she says. “[Some dishes] have a sort of sweetness as well. It’s all about the balance between salty, sour, and sweet.”
“I would like to do a traditional adobo [when I get back to the UK], but I also want to try and see if I can make it in a different way,” she adds. “In a sense, when you cook, you always take the culture and refract them from the prism of your own experience and cultural background. So that must happen too. In other words, for cooking to be authentic, you don’t have to open a Filipino restaurant for it to be authentic. It has to be in my voice.”
Just like any other chef, Nigella obviously grabs inspiration from her travels, the people she’s met, the books she’s read, and so on. Maybe one day we’ll be seeing her cook a Filipino dish, in one of her TV shows, or even write a recipe or an editorial piece on them in the future. But there’s no denying that Nigella will be taking her audience along with her eloquent words, just like she always does.
Photo courtesy of Nigella Lawson’s Facebook page
Follow Preen on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and Viber
