A chocolate brownie is a flat, baked square or bar introduced in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century and popularized in both the U.S. and Canada during the first half of the twentieth century. The brownie is sliced from a type of dense, rich chocolate cake, which is, in texture, like a cross between a cake and a cookie. Brownies come in a variety of forms. They are either fudgy or cakey, depending on their density, and they may include nuts, frosting, whipped cream, chocolate chips, or other ingredients. A variation that is made with brown sugar and no chocolate is called a blondie.
Brownies are common lunchbox fare, typically eaten by hand, and often accompanied by milk or coffee. They are sometimes served warm with ice cream () or topped with whipped cream, especially in restaurants.
The earliest published recipes for a brownie like those of today appeared in the Home Cookery (1904, Laconia, NH), Service Club Cook Book (1904, Chicago, IL), The Boston Globe (April 2, 1905 p. 34) and the 1906 edition of The Boston Cooking School Cook Book by Fannie Merritt Farmer. These recipes produced a relatively mild and cake-like brownie. The name "brownie" first appeared in the 1896 version of the cookbook, but this was in reference to molasses cakes baked individually in tin molds, not true brownies.
A second recipe appeared in 1907 in Lowney’s Cook Book, by Maria Willet Howard and published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, Massachusetts. This recipe added an extra egg and an additional square of chocolate to the Boston Cooking School recipe, creating a richer, fudgier brownie. The recipe was named Bangor Brownies, possibly because it was created by a woman in Bangor, Maine.
The chocolate brownie, once familiar only to Americans and Canadians, can now be found in many bakeries in Europe.
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| Full name | Nigella Lucy Lawson |
|---|---|
| Caption | At a Borders book-signing in 2004 |
| Birth name | Nigella Lucy Lawson |
| Birth date | January 06, 1960 |
| Birth place | London, United Kingdom |
| Residence | London, United Kingdom |
| Nationality | British |
| Known for | TV presenting, cookery |
| Education | MA in mediæval and modern languages |
| Alma mater | Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford |
| Employer | BBC |
| Occupation | Food writer, journalist and broadcaster |
| Years active | 1983–present |
| Title | The Honourable |
| Height | |
| Spouse | |
| Children | Cosima and Bruno |
| Parents | Nigel Lawson Vanessa Salmon (deceased) |
| Relations | Sir A.J. Ayer (mother's widower) Dominic Lawson (brother) |
| Website | www.nigella.com |
In 2000, she began to host her own cookery series on Channel 4, Nigella Bites, which was accompanied with another bestselling cookery book. The Nigella Bites series won Lawson a Guild of Food Writers Award, however her 2005 ITV daytime chat show was met with a negative critical reaction and was cancelled after attracting low ratings. In the United States in 2006, Lawson hosted the Food Network's Nigella Feasts, followed by a three-part BBC Two series, Nigella's Christmas Kitchen, in the United Kingdom. This led to the commissioning of Nigella Express on BBC Two in 2007. Her own cookware range, Living Kitchen, has a value of £7 million, and she has sold more than 3 million cookery books worldwide.
Renowned for her flirtatious manner of presenting, Lawson has been called the "queen of food porn". She is neither a trained chef nor cook, and has assumed a distinctly relaxed approach to her cooking.
Lawson's mother died of liver cancer in Westminster, London, aged 48 in 1985, when Lawson was 25. another sister, Horatia; and a brother, Dominic, former editor of The Sunday Telegraph. She has a half-brother Tom, and a half-sister Emily, her father's children with his current wife. She is also a cousin to both George Monbiot and Fiona Shackleton through the Salmons.
Taking part in the third series of the BBC family-history documentary series, Who Do You Think You Are?, Lawson sought to uncover some of her family's ancestry. She traced her ancestors to Ashkenazi Jews who originate from eastern Europe and Germany, leaving Lawson surprised not to have Iberian-Sephardi ancestry in the family as she had believed. She also uncovered that her maternal great-great-great grandfather, Coenraad Sammes (later Coleman Joseph), had fled to England from Amsterdam in 1830 to escape a prison sentence following a conviction for theft. It was his daughter, Hannah, who married Samuel Gluckstein, father-in-law and business partner of Barnett Salmon and father of Isidore and Montague Gluckstein, who together with Barnett founded J. Lyons and Co. in 1887.
After her stint at The Sunday Times, Lawson embarked upon a freelance writing career, realizing that "I was on the wrong ladder. I didn’t want to be an executive, being paid to worry rather than think". and a makeup column for The Times Magazine, After just two weeks working on Talk Radio in 1995, Lawson was sacked after she had stated her shopping was done for her, which was deemed incompatible with the radio station's desired "common touch". How to Eat was subsequently written in 1998,
Lawson then wrote How to be a Domestic Goddess in 2000, which focused primarily on baking and stated, "Some people did take the domestic goddess title literally rather than ironically. It was about the pleasures of feeling like one rather than actually being one". One commentator suggested she won the award only because her husband was about to die of cancer. As a result of the book's success, The Observer took on Lawson as a social affairs columnist. followed by a Christmas special in 2001. Victor Lewis-Smith, a critic notorious for his biting criticism, commended Lawson for being "formidably charismatic". and won her the Television Broadcast of the Year at the Guild of Food Writers Awards and the Best Television Food Show at the World Food Media Awards in 2001. The show yielded an accompanying bestselling recipe book, also called Nigella Bites, for which Waterstone's book stores reported UK sales of over 300,000. The book won a W H Smith Award for Lifestyle Book of the Year.
The Nigella Bites series, which was filmed in her home in west London, was later broadcast on American television on channels E! and Style Network. The series was followed by Forever Summer with Nigella in 2002 on Channel 4, the concept being, "that you cook to make you still feel as though you're on holiday". and increasing to £7 million in 2007.
In the UK in 2005, Lawson started to host a daytime television chat show on ITV1 called Nigella, on which celebrity guests joined her in a studio kitchen. The show was met with a largely negative critical reaction, and after losing 40 percent of its viewers in the first week, the show was cancelled. Lawson later commented in an interview with Radio Times that on her first show, she was almost too frightened to come out of her dressing room. Lawson further stated that having to pretend to be interested in the lives of the celebrities on her show became too much of an effort.
Her third food-based television series, called Nigella Feasts, debuted on the USA's Food Network in Autumn 2006 for a 13-week run. Since the American broadcasting, Lawson signed a £2.5 million deal for the series to be shown in ten other countries across the world.
Lawson was next signed to BBC Two to host a three-part cookery show entitled Nigella's Christmas Kitchen, which began on 6 December 2006 and aired weekly. The first two episodes secured the second highest ratings of the week for BBC Two, with the first episode debuting with a strong 3.5 million. The final episode went on to become the top show on BBC Two the week that it was aired. Her influence as a food commentator was also demonstrated in late 2006, when after she had lauded goose fat as being an essential ingredient for Christmas, sales percentages of the product increased significantly in the UK. Waitrose and Tesco both stated that goose fat sales had more than doubled, as well as Asda's goose fat sales increasing by 65 percent from the previous week. Similarly, after she advised using prunes in a recipe on Nigella's Christmas Kitchen, Waitrose had increased sales of 30 percent year on year.
The television series of Nigella Express was subject to criticism from the Daily Mail when it emerged that a bus Lawson was seen travelling on during the programme had been hired and filled with extras. Critics criticised the series for containing what they described as "scenes of gluttony not seen since the golden age of the Cookie Monster" and commenting that her "largesse may have left her just that little bit larger." The rights to Nigella Express have been sold to the Food Network in America, The series was nominated at the 35th Daytime Emmy Awards in the United States for Outstanding Lifestyle Program, and Lawson herself for the Outstanding Lifestyle Host.
The accompanying book to Nigella Express was released in the UK in September 2007, America in November 2007, Sharing the same name as the television series, the book became another bestseller in the UK, and was outselling another television chef, Jamie Oliver, by 100,000 copies according to Waterstone's. Paul Levy from The Guardian wrote that the tone of the recipes was "just right. One of the appealing things about Nigella's brief introductions to each of them is that she thinks not just as cook, but as eater, and tells you whether they're messy, sticky or fussy". Her Christmas book was released in October 2008 and the television show in December of the same year. An American edition of the book "Nigella Christmas" with a different cover photograph was released in November 2009 with an accompanying book tour of several US cities and a special on the USA's Food Network.
Lawson has become renowned for her flirtatious manner of presenting, although she argues, "It’s not meant to be flirtatious. ... I don’t have the talent to adopt a different persona. It's intimate, not flirtatious". Many commentators have alluded to Lawson's attractiveness, and she was once named as one of the world's most beautiful women. The Guardian wrote, "Men love her because they want to be with her. Women love her because they want to be her". Despite often being labelled as a domestic goddess, she insists that she exhibits very few of the qualities associated with the title. as one critic summarized, "her descriptions of food can be a tangle of adjectives." Lawson has also expressed her surprise at how many reviews in the United States have mentioned her class and posh accent. Impressions by Ronni Ancona that further parodied Lawson's presenting style have also been featured on the BBC One impersonation sketch show, The Big Impression. Diamond was found to have throat cancer in 1997, and died in March 2001, aged 47. having drawn disapproval when she moved in with him nine months after Diamond's death. They currently live in London's exclusive Belgravia district. while Lawson herself is worth £15 million as of 2007, £8 million of which came from book sales.
Despite being a celebrated cook, Lawson says in a Cookie interview that she lives a "hermitlike" existence that's short on tabloid fodder. On a regular school day, she takes her kids to school and works on her books and food columns until they return. During the 10 weeks a year that she spends filming, things are more hectic, but no matter how time-crunched Lawson is, there are some quick-meal routes she just won't take: "My son recently said to me, 'You have no idea how delicious KFC is.' And I said, 'I'm sure you're right, but I'm not gonna give it to you.'"
Although both of Lawson's parents are Jewish, Judaism has played no significant part religiously in her life, but she reckons that she has developed a somewhat "Jewish character". In one of her newspaper articles, she has shown a liberal attitude to sexuality ("most [women] simply have, somewhere, a fantasy about having sex, in a non-defining, non-exclusive way, with other women"). She has said that she often partakes in watching football and is an avid supporter of Chelsea.
Lawson is a supporter of the Lavender Trust which gives support to young women with breast cancer. She first became involved with the charity in 2002 when she baked some lavender cupcakes to be auctioned at a fundraising event, which sold for a significant amount of money. She subsequently featured the recipe in her book, Forever Summer with Nigella.
It was revealed by leaked Whitehall documents in 2003 that Lawson declined an OBE from Queen Elizabeth II in 2001. As the daughter of a life peer, Nigella is entitled to the courtesy title of "The Honourable" and is thus styled The Hon. Nigella Lawson. However she does not use this courtesy title.
In December 2008, Lawson caused major controversy and was featured in various newspapers for publicly advocating wearing fur. Lawson also remarked that she would love to kill a bear and then wear it.
Lawson was featured as one of the three judges on the special battle of Iron Chef America, titled "The Super Chef Battle", which pitted White House Executive Chef Christeta Comerford and Iron Chef Bobby Flay against super chef Emeril Lagasse and Iron Chef Mario Batali, which was originally broadcast on January 3, 2010.
Category:1960 births Category:Living people Category:Alumni of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford Category:British Book Awards Category:British Jews Category:Daughters of barons Category:English atheists Category:English chefs Category:English food writers Category:English Jews Category:English people of German descent Category:English people of Dutch descent Category:English journalists Category:English television chefs Category:English television presenters Category:Food Network chefs Category:Jewish atheists Category:Old Dolphins Category:Old Westminsters Category:The Sunday Times people
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
