When The Great British Bake Off returns for its 17th series this autumn, viewers will be greeted by a new judge – Nigella Lawson. There are connections between Lawson’s domestic goddess persona and the world of Bake Off, which make her a logical choice for the show’s new judge.

For more than two decades, Lawson has occupied a distinctive place in British food culture. Since the publication of How to Be a Domestic Goddess (2000), she has cultivated a tongue-in-cheek persona that reimagined domestic labour for the noughties generation.

The title of Lawson’s cookbook was deliberately provocative. At a time when domesticity was often framed as something women should escape, Lawson embraced and reinvented its language. Her domestic goddess persona was neither the dutiful housewife nor the professional celebrity chef. Instead, she offered a mode of culinary femininity that was sensual, confessional and self-consciously performative.

As I argue in my new book, Women, Food, Performance: The Tyranny of the Domestic Goddess, the persona Lawson popularised remains a defining cultural figure through which the fantasies and contradictions of food, femininity and domesticity are performed and negotiated.

Cooking, in Lawson’s world, is less about obligation than pleasure, transforming the kitchen into a space of self-expression.

This is where the first alignment with Bake Off emerges. Although framed as a competition, the programme has become a key stage for telling stories about........

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