Profile on Sophie Dahl: Recipe for a domestic goddess

Published on Saturday 18 July 2009 19:47

As a child she knew 17 homes on four continents, including an Indian ashram

THE pantheon of domestic goddesses has just got bigger. Doubled in size, in fact, as husky, simpering culinary temptress Nigella Lawson is joined in the kitchen by former model and fellow English rose Sophie Dahl. It promises to be a hugely entertaining contest for the heart, soul and stomach of a nation besotted with top-draw totty in pinnies.

With her double entendres, raised eyebrows, pouting lips and barely restrained finger-licking sexuality, Lawson has spent the best part of a decade as the pin-up girl of the newly gastro-literate. Yet if North London's finest has spent the last ten years proving the Cadbury's Flake maxim that sex and food sell beautifully – to women who want proof that they can have it all, and to men with dreams of steamy action around the stove – her next birthday is her 50th and her sizeable portfolio of cookery books may be reaching the end of its shelf life.

Step forward Dahl, the 31-year-old pretender to Nigella's mink-lined throne. Her debut cookbook, Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights, may sound like a cross between an S&M handbook and a visual cue to remind us of her most famous moment, when the car-stopping Opium billboard ad that had a naked Dahl writhing around in faux ecstasy on black silk was banned in 2000 after receiving a record number of complaints, yet the recently released tome is already causing ripples of excitement in media circles. The BBC has certainly done nothing to refute rumours that it has commissioned a cookery series starring Dahl.

Dahl's Hideous Kinky-style upbringing was tricky, with her 19-year-old mother Tessa and father Julian Holloway splitting shortly after Dahl was born. Tessa, a highly strung wildchild who had affairs with Peter Sellers and Brian de Palma, then went on a restless trawl of the world, dragging her daughter behind her. At 16, mother and daughter were clubbing together, while Sophie twice acted as her mother's bridesmaid.

Her childhood encompassed 17 homes on four continents, including an Indian ashram, and by the age of 13 Dahl had attended ten schools. She longed for the stability that her alcoholic, depressed mother struggled to provide, the lowest point coming at 17 when her mother, who was in and out of rehab, slept with one of her closest male friends.

Dahl can boast impressive artistic antecedents. She is the granddaughter of Roald Dahl, who would sit on the end of her bed as a girl and read her passages of James And The Giant Peach and who named the "poor little scrumplet" at the centre of The BFG after her. Her other grandfather was the famous Ealing comedy actor Stanley Holloway.

Dahl learnt to eat properly from Roald's wife GeeGee, whose credo of three meat-and-two-veg meals each day appealed to the youngster's craving for normality.

If Lawson is undoubtedly the better cook, Dahl is out on her own when it comes to the writing. A single child until the age of eight, she would curl up in the airing cupboard and read Enid Blyton or Pippi Longstocking books for hours, eventually graduating to her favourite authors Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh.

Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights is her third literary offering after the children's book The Man With The Dancing Eyes in 2003 and the semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel Playing With The Grown-Ups in 2006, in which the adolescent protagonist with legions of half-siblings, an absent father and a flighty mother tours the world in search of enlightenment.

It is extremely surprising that Dahl is so relaxed about food. Not only was there the teenage anorexia, but throughout her career as a model her size – at 6ft with a 38DD bra and size 14-16 clothes, she was in a minority of one on the catwalk – was a constant reference point.

Isabella Blow, the eccentric fashionista who discovered her when getting out of a taxi in central London, famously told her that she had "the most beautiful face I've ever seen and the body of a Playboy bunny – I'll make you a supermodel". But Blow's other piece of advice ("No more chips and puddings for you") is rarely quoted.

Dahl's emergence as a "Miss Average" kick-started a debate about the degree to which "normal" women were represented in advertising and the media in general. Yet the anticipated wave of size-14 models never happened, and at one stage Dahl even came under fire from feminists who perceived her weight loss as a sleight on womankind in general. Actually, it was nothing like that: her weight often fluctuated with her moods, going up when she first became a model and happily gorged herself, later going down when she was miserable. At one stage a three-day diet of powdered soup and dried pitta bread led to a bout of the bug C difficile, but her fluctuations in weight were more down to her state of mind rather than a battle against nature.

Yet if she was caricatured as a big-boned amazon throughout her stellar modelling career, in person she was a million miles from being overweight. Former flatmate and journalist Toby Young describes entering a party with her as "being at the centre of a hurricane", and those who meet her don't know whether to dwell on her intelligence, statuesque beauty or down-to-earth demeanour (which includes a penchant for earthy jokes).

Dahl is so relaxed about her life these days because, thanks to her mother's antics, she got all the embarrassment out of the way early. In her twenties she was a tabloid staple as she went through her nightclubbing years, particularly when at 24 she came out of a relationship with 45-year-old American actor Griffin Dunne and immediately started a long affair with her friend Jade Jagger's 58-year-old dad Mick.

She conducted the affair with a level of discretion that few of Jagger's previous girlfriends had contemplated, but a relationship that many saw as a search for a father figure did not end well. Dahl fell out with Jade, to whom she had been close, and shortly after she and Jagger went their separate ways she published the novella The Man With The Dancing Eyes, in which a "legendary and Byronic" suitor breaks the beautiful heroine's heart. She refused to comment on whether the man in question was Jagger.

But then Dahl has never been one to dance to other people's tunes. She has always done as she pleased, eaten what she fancies, worn what she wants. Not only does her book feature her wearing the fashion equivalent of sackcloth and ashes – baggy jumpers and muddy wellies – but the six-foot Londoner is engaged to 5ft 6in jazz singer and pianist Jamie Cullum, and laughs off the difference in their height.

She may be a domestic goddess of sorts, but that's where the similarities with Nigella Lawson start and end. Call her whatever you want, Dahl is definitely her own woman.

Dahl resented the focus on her size, saying that she "never intended to be a crusader for curvy chicks".

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• She was discovered by journalist Isabella Blow, who introduced her to Sarah Doukas at the Storm model agency. Her career really took off when she met photographer Steven Meisel, who photographed her for the cover of Italian Vogue.

• Dahl is well known among her friends for impulsively generous gestures, like the time she gave a pensioner 100 in cash on Christmas Eve because they weren't going to be able to draw their pension until the holiday was over.

• Dahl went to a chocolate factory when she was 10 and couldn't eat chocolate for a year afterwards.

• She met her fianc Jamie Cullum, above, at "a charity thing that I sang at. He accompanied me as I sang 'I Think It's Going To Rain Today', by Nina Simone – a tricky song to sing in front of 800 people."

• Dahl's father Julian Holloway appeared in eight Carry On films.