TV chef who’d make Nigella BLUSH
From her aristocratic Scottish roots to her podcast on sex, Gizzi Erskine is Britain’s most unconventional kitchen star...
GIZZIErskinei sin the kitchen, diligently whisking cake batter. In the background rests a pile of pots and pans, while a cup of coffee sits on the counter. It would, in fact, be a typical domestic scene, were it not for the fact that Erskine is wearing the sort of lingerie that would make Nigella Lawson scuttle back to the modesty of her dressing gown.
With her sultry features, outgoing persona and uncanny resemblance to a modern Audrey Hepburn, it is perhaps unsurprising that 41-year-old Erskine has been selected as one of the faces of raunchy, upmarket lingerie firm Agent Provocateur’s latest advertising campaign.
Indeed, the Scottish chef, who rose to fame with the TV series Cook Yourself Thin, would appear to be embracing the role with the sort of gusto she usually reserves for her recipes.
In one shot she sprawls on a dining table next to a platter of seafood; in another s he poses scantily clad in a doorway, clutching an enormous slice of cake.
‘This experience has made me take a beat to remember I am an empowered, sexy woman, when my life is often overwhelming,’ she said of the campaign.
‘I won’t pretend I didn’t spend a week trying to shave a little bit of squidge off, but there is only so much you can do in a week.’
Golly. It is hardly the usual telly chef photoshoot. But then Erskine has never been your regular sort of TV chef.
Born into Scottish aristocracy (she is, in f act, the Honourable Griselda Maxwell Erskine of Rerrick) and a selfconfessed teenage tearaway with a complex family background who ended up running a body piercing studio in Camden in her twenties, Erskine defies pigeonholes.
Nowadays she moves in glamorous celebrity circles, has had rumoured romances with DJ Professor Green and Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker (more on that later), and holds trendy pop-ups at chic London restaurants.
IF, as Anthony Worrall Thompson once suggested, Delia Smith is the Volvo of the cookery world, then Erskine is an open-top E-type Jaguar, albeit one which runs on electricity.
Now she has a timely new cookbook out, Restore, which looks at sustainable eating and cookery at a time when we have never needed it more.
‘When I wrote this book I had no idea what was around the corner,’ Erskine said.
‘The world was about to be l ocked down, restaurants would be shut and everyone would be baking sourdough bread and shopping locally.
‘ This is what my book is hoping to address; this is a crucial time for the planet to reassess its relationship with food.’
The book contains a number of recipes, many of them vegan and vegetarian. There is Marmite and onion veg stew, ‘three ways with beans’ and instructions on how to make your own homemade vinegars.
It comes with chapters on skills such as pickling and preserving, and with a strong emphasis on what can be made and sourced locally.
She i s realistic, however, about her message.
‘It’s all good and well me sitting here, having a lovely life – but the truth is, most people will struggle eating like this, not only if they can’t afford it, but if they can’t find it, because accessibility is the key thing,’ she said recently.
Her stance is refreshingly down to earth in a world where many TV chefs expect viewers to drop everything in order to devote their time to nurturing a sourdough starter.
But while Erskine takes her food – and how to source it – seriously, the Agent Provocateur shoot hints at a more, well, provocative side to the woman who was once voted Britain’s Sexiest Chef at the annual Kitchen Crumpet Awards (yes, really).
Take her podcast, Sex, Lies and DM Slides, in which she and friend Sydney Lima, a model, discuss the dilemmas of modern love and dating.
Guests have included Lily Allen and sex columnist Karley Sciortino and a recent skit saw the pair take to the streets of Soho to quiz strangers on their bedroom habits.
Then there is the fact that in her Instagram biography she describes her interests as ‘food and sex’. Certainly, her love life is intriguing.
Eyebrows were raised last summer when Erskine was spotted sipping prosecco at a London music festival in the company of Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker.
Could the crisp promoter really be courting the cook-itall-from-scratch chef? A friend brushed off the suggestion that
‘ There were times when we couldn’t afford to eat’
they were dating, explaining that the pair were, in fact, old chums.
‘ They met t hrough mutual friends. Gary has never been to a festival before and Gizzi took him along,’ came the not entirely convincing explanation.
Whatever the nature of the pair’s relationship, they have both clearly moved on.
Lineker has been seen in the company of his ex-wife Danielle Bux, while in a recent interview Erskine hinted at a ‘new partner’ whose identity has remained undercover.
Any partner of Erskine’s will, however, have to be understanding about her unconventional living situation. She shares a house in London with Dean Martin, her former fiancé, whom she still describes as her best friend.
‘Dean and I were together for ten years. When we split up we rented this place out but when we both found ourselves single again, we thought, “F*** it, let’s move in and do it up”,’ she revealed recently.
‘We’re great mates and get on with each other’s new partners. It’s a very modern family.’
Erskine’s own family was, to say the least, unconventional. The middle of three daughters to the 2nd Baron Erskine of Rerrick, her early life was a gilded whirl between the family’s Belgravia home and the th Steilston Castle estate near Dumfries. When she was eight, her parents divorced after her father, a photographer, lost the family fortu tune thanks to an ill-fated business ve venture. Erskine was pulled out of pr private school and, moving to a flat w with her mother and two sisters, se sent to the local primary.
‘People hear my voice, think I’m p posh and presume I’m privileged,’ sh she said. ‘In fact, I had the most fr frugal upbringing and we were very poor. My mother started again with three h children on her own. I went to state school. There were times when w we couldn’t afford to eat.’
ERSkInE’S father remarried and decamped to Cyprus, while her mother took a job as a personal as assistant to a property tycoon, meaning she often had to travel, leaving e her daughters at home.
‘I knew I was totally loved and th that there was a reason why she h had to be away,’ she said.
In fact, i t was her mother’s tr travels which inspired Erskine’s lo love of cooking.
‘I remember my sister being really ill when I was 13 and my mum was aw away in Thailand,’ she said. ‘I wanted to make my sister feel better, so I decided to make one of the dishes my mum used to make
‘Mum’s a great cook. She’d spent a lot of time in Asia so her food was very international – things like fruit soup for starters or Thai fish mousse.
‘I called my mum and we spent half an hour talking through how to make something. We ended up doing that all the time.’
When Erskine was 14, her father returned home from Cyprus. He was dying of cancer.
‘My way of dealing with it was to keep away from it – from him,’ she said. ‘I began partying and hanging out in nightclubs. I didn’t want to face it because I didn’t want to believe Dad was going to die. I thought he’d get better – that he’d defy the odds.’
Her father died the day she was due to sit her first GCSE.
She skipped the exam, went clubbing, and never returned to the examination hall. ‘I became a complete tearaway,’ she said. ‘I had my tongue pierced and I probably did too much too young.
Intending to return to school at 16, she was instead scouted by a modelling agency, although she quickly realised it was not for her (‘I felt vacuous and awkward’) and instead became a receptionist at a body-piercing studio, where she remained for eight years, working her way up to studio manager.
But food remained a passion. She said: ‘I moved out of home at 19, so I’d go to bed with a cookbook thinking, “Right, what am I going to cook tomorrow?”.’
A £20,000 inheritance from her grandmother secured her a place at the prestigious Leith’s cookery school, where she worked herself into the ground to train and won an internship on Good Food magazine – awarded to the school’s best student – as a result.
‘I came top of that school because I wanted it that badly,’ she said, showing some of the grit and determination that saw her translate the internship into a spot on Sky’s The Taste and eventually into her own Channel 4 show, Cook Yourself Thin, along with the seven cookbooks and myriad restaurant popups that have come since.
These days she moves in a circle of well- heeled pals who have surnames such as Guinness and Sitwell, and include rumoured ex Professor Green, a DJ with whom she launched a pop-up restaurant this summer named, aptly, Giz and Green, selling the fast-food ‘fakeaway’ dishes the two of them cooked up together online in lockdown.
She was also close friends with Caroline Flack, the Love Island presenter who took her own life this year.
Writing on Instagram following her friend’s death, Erskine revealed
Flack had ‘quite literally saved my life once when I was going through hell and I now need to live with the fact that I was unable to do the same for her’.
Erskine has been open about her mental health, revealing that she has suffered with depression and as an adult was diagnosed with ADHD – attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
‘My ADHD has its benefits – a superpower,’ she once said. ‘Without it I probably wouldn’t have been able to cope with everything at once.
‘I’m lucky in a way that it means I am constantly, “go go go”. I don’t sit down. It has been positive.
‘Obviously, I have been in bad places before and suffered depression a few years ago.
‘A lot of the time mental health is very negative and I know that these things are difficult for people. But sometimes it’s good to see people who have struggled and I hope to empower people that they can achieve and give them some confidence.’
BACk in 2018 she wrote an essay about her three-stone weight gain after posting a picture on Instagram and revealing that she had stayed at home rather than attend an awards ceremony because she felt ‘gross’.
‘Every time I looked in the mirror I saw someone else,’ she wrote.
‘I didn’t feel like the beautiful, confident woman I wanted to be (that you need to be on a red carpet), more like a trussed-up piece of meat.
‘I’ll never “truly” diet but I’d like to lose two stone (if it takes years, that’s fine). I’m being practical. not silly.’
In her recent shoot for Agent Provocateur, however, any such qualms had disappeared.
‘It was made clear that they wanted me for my curves and I just went out and owned them,’ she said.
It is a philosophy that seems to be working for her, in photoshoots and in life.
‘Caroline Flack saved me and I couldn’t do the same’