Delicious Miss Dahl rejects ‘base’ Nigella comparisons

Sophie Dahl, who is promoting her new cookery show, has attacked comparisons between herself and Nigella Lawson as trivial and demeaning.

But Dahl is fighting a losing battle. Comparisons between the 32-year-old former 'plus size' model and the voluptuous Lawson were inevitable - even though Dahl is actually now rather slim. She has not been helped by her new show’s marketing team.

While the BBC2 TV series will be called The Delicious Miss Dahl (actually, she's now a Mrs, having married jazz pianist Jamie Cullum earlier this year), the spin-off recipe book is called Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights.

According to the Daily Telegraph, viewers who turn on to Miss Dahl will be treated to revelations that putting too much rosewater into rhubarb Eton mess produces a result "like walking into a bordello". And she reveals that she likes her cheese "sharp and mature, like my men".

The Daily Mail is already drooling: "She seductively toys with an olive on the end of a cocktail stick. She licks her lips lasciviously after taking a deep sniff at a bottle of wine… And occasionally, Sophie Dahl actually does some cooking."

And while the imaginations of her audience run wild, Dahl, who is also a writer, reveals some outlandish fantasies of her own. While admiring an art deco cocktail shaker, she says: "I could be in my bias-cut nightie - with a man with a thin moustache lurking mysteriously."

But in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Dahl rejects any comparisons with Nigella, saying she is stylistically very different. "I do think there is room for the two of us. It's quite an obvious and base comparison because what they are really comparing is the fact that we are both middle-class women who aren't trained cooks.

"What can I do about it? Absolutely ---- all." ·