Hold the sauce! She's the pouting 6ft ex-model trying to dethrone Nigella. But Jan Moir finds Sophie Dahl's new TV show hard to swallow

Trying to dethrone Nigella? Sophie Dahl on her new cookery show

Can Sophie Dahl cut the mustard as the new Nigella? On the first of her new cookery shows, the former supermodel couldn't even cut the bread properly. In fact, until Sophie took a knife to her loaf of sourdough, it hadn't occurred to me that there is a right way and a wrong way to slice bread to make bruschetta.
Yet Sophie somehow contrives to do it the wrong way, meaning that she's toast at toast.
This does not exactly bode well for her nascent career as a television cook.
Last night, BBC2 broadcast the first of six cookery shows entitled The Delicious Miss Dahl, in a bid to launch the ravishing, 6ft blonde as a culinary star.
Already, the format seems to suggest that each half-hour programme, themed around a different emotion every week, offers little more than a souffle of twice-baked Nigella, with sauce on the side.
It will feature lots of 'indulgently luscious recipes', the BBC blurb insists and (following in the minxy footsteps of the original domestic goddess) be fronted by the requisite posh, sexy bird for ever on the prowl between hot grill and cheap thrill.
In this case, step forward Sophie Dahl, the 32-year-old granddaughter of children's author Roald Dahl, the woman who recently married jazz musician Jamie Cullum.
'I just want to share my love of honest, simple food,' she peeps, in her full cream, baby doll voice.
'I'm just a greedy person who likes to eat.' Yet from the opening scenes, Sophie does little to dissuade viewers that she is the sizzling new Cinderella to Nigella's steamy Snow White.

 

Over a cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner, Miss Dahl turns out to be an assiduous licker of fingers, a keen fondler of courgettes  -  and an enthusiastic displayer of yummy muffins.
In true Nigella fashion, she is also a rampant frotteur of dairy products; a girl who can and does sidle up to an innocent ball of buffalo mozzarella and squeeze it with both manicured hands while whispering of her wet cheese dreams.
'There's something about whipping a great, soft hunk of it off,' she says.
Is there really? 'Yes, it reminds me of...' Yes, yes, yes, yes, Sophie! It reminds you of what?
'The wobbly bit on someone's arm.' 

Enlarge  
 

However, our little scrumplet is not the only vision of utter loveliness to dazzle in this new series, which is made by Jamie Oliver's company, Fresh One Productions.
The Delicious Miss Dahl is filmed in the kind of wondrous, sunshine-dappled, all-white kitchen about which many cooks  -  including myself  -  can only fantasise.
In this exquisite, shabby chic domain there are acres of cool space, a four-oven Aga (also  -  whimper  -  white), plus piles of divine vintage crockery, racks of covetable utensils  -  a lady can never have enough ladles  -  and pastel bunches of hand-tied flowers strewn artfully around.

  

There is even a heartbreaking green enamel colander that makes my spinach wilt every time it hoves into shot. I want it so much, it's draining.
Outside Sophie's French doors there are more Sophie delights: a barbecue, where she grills her scallops on the half shell; some Cath Kidston bunting strung coyly from the eaves; a romantic alfresco table for two; and even a vintage deckchair where The DMD (Delicious Miss Dahl) lounges to read postprandial poetry to her viewers.
Of course, Dahl tacitly encourages the conceit that this kitchen is her kitchen  -  but nothing could be further from the truth. The intensely private model/actress/novelist  - a woman who only invades her own privacy for a jolly good self-promoting cause  -  would never bare her own saucepans and sink to the great unwashed.
Are you kidding? Be grateful that she is sharing her recipe for buckwheat blinis and be gone with you, serf.
Sophie's onscreen kitchen is actually part of a North London location home, owned by a photographer and (conveniently) currently on the market for a cool £1.45million.
The rest of the all-white rooms are regularly used in fashion and magazine shoots, while Fresh One Productions rented the property for two months of filming last year. In short? It's a sham.
Will cookery fans feel cheated to discover that the gorgeous kitchen is not Sophie Dahl's own? Maybe, but we have been here before; we should be used to the lightly steamed perfidy.

Revealing: The Delicious Miss Dahl shows some skin as she bends down to get something out of the oven

Three years ago, the BBC was embarrassed when it emerged that Nigella Lawson, who has more neck than a Lancashire hotpot, had mocked up her Belgravia home in a studio on an industrial estate in South London.
Elsewhere, Delia Smith and Jamie Oliver cook from studio-type extensions built on to their country homes; Delia in her Suffolk conservatory, Jamie in his Essex potting shed.
Nigel Slater, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Gordon Ramsay are all regularly filmed cooking at their own homes, while Rick Stein  -  after his wife threw him out  -  used to cook rather sombre little suppers on the Aga at his producer's house.
While a few of these household names may have worked briefly in restaurant kitchens, most of them are not properly trained, professional cooks. So what?
They all clearly know their way around a kitchen and a recipe, they all understand food at an inspiring or intuitive level. The thing is, can we say the same about the new girl?
Watching Sophie negotiate her dazzling, all-white kitchen to make something as simple as no-cook peanut butter fudge is like watching Bambi skitter across the frozen lake. Any minute now, you know it is all going to go splat.
Yes, she is charming and lovely and not without a sense of humour, but there are moments when one doubts that Sophie should be left in charge of a stationary vegetable peeler, let alone a cooking series.
However, it is not her (in)ability to peel and chop that grates the most; it is her appetites and tastes that find Dahl at her most unconvincing.
In evidence, I name her recipe (featured on next week's show) for a shepherd's pie inexplicably made with beef, not lamb, and jazzed up with balsamic vinegar and Bloody Mary seasonings. And also her Eton Mess with rhubarb. Why, why?
Her 2009 cookbook, Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights, is padded out with 'recipes' for things like baked apples, grilled bananas and vegetables with halloumi, while there are eight recipes that feature chicken and one for lamb (look for it in the index after Lagerfeld, Karl), even through Dahl herself is a fish-eating vegetarian.
She claims to have been inspired by the good food served at Roald Dahl's table  -  he did not cook, but was a keen eater and, with second wife Felicity, published an excellent cookbook in 1991  -  and learned baking at her grandmother Gee-Gee's knee.
She fondly recalls a 'Victoria sponge, light as a feather and dripping with home-made raspberry jam, just out of the oven.'
Yet a Victoria sponge  -  actually, it should be Victoria sandwich, but let's not split vanilla pods  -  would not drip with jam just out of the oven. You have to wait until it is cold before you put the jam on it  -  as even the most amateur cook knows.
And for a girl who looks as if she snacks on buttercups and fresh air, The DMD sure claims to pack away an impressive amount of grub.

Tempting: Sophie tucks into an oyster in the sunshine-dappled kitchen

In the first show in her make-believe kitchen, Sophie pretends to spend an indulgent day alone, cooking all her favourite treats for herself.
For breakfast, she has omelette Arnold Bennett, followed by that lunch of mozzarella bruschetta and a tray of homemade peanut fudge. Then it's a dirty martini, a dinner of halibut with a dairy sauce and sweet potatoes, followed by chocolate pots with brandy-soaked cherries. Burp!
Yet Sophie, who was once a size 16 but is now, by her own admission, a 'little slip shadow of a creature', even bites into her own food with the tentative unease of someone who expects it to bite back.
And when she's not nibbling like an anteater on an ant canape, she is straining at every seam to project a personality that is equal parts Nancy Mitford, Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Parker. Like cholesterol, she is sometimes too rich for the blood.
'I get a childish sense of satisfaction from popping fuchsia buds and perfectly formed blinis,' she says at one point.
'Oysters are an open invitation to carnal knowledge,' she says at another. Oh, the impulse to thrash her hard with one of her vintage ladles that she doesn't own is almost irresistible.
However, let's be fair. In a world where former Michelin-star chef Marco Pierre White sees no shame nor conflict in promoting Bernard Matthews turkey products, and where Jamie Oliver once marketed a flavour shaker, Sophie's television venture into the usual half-baked fakery is not the worse foodie crime around.
Do you know what is? Her recipe for grilled wild salmon with cheesy baked onions. Now that really is a sin.