“The Great British Baking Show” announced a new judge on Monday: Nigella Lawson, the British author and cooking personality, after the departure of Prue Leith from the show.
“I’m uncharacteristically rather lost for words right now!” Ms. Lawson said in a statement announcing her appointment, calling the show a “national treasure.”
The series, known as “The Great British Bake Off” in Britain, developed into one of the most popular shows on British television after its debut in 2010. In 2016, the show’s producer, Love Productions, decided to leave the BBC for Channel 4, a rival network, prompting a judge, Mary Berry, and two of the show’s hosts, Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc, to depart. Ms. Leith replaced Ms. Berry in 2017.
Ms. Lawson said it was “daunting” to be following in the footsteps of Ms. Leith and Mary Berry.
Ms. Leith, 86, said this month that she was stepping away after nine seasons and more than 400 challenges on the show. Ms. Lawson joins Paul Hollywood, another judge who remained with the show after it left the BBC, and the presenters Noel Fielding and Alison Hammond.
Under the signature tent that serves as the show’s set, bakers compete in challenges for the judges and presenters, pushing the boundaries of baking with unconventional creations. The show has been credited with changing the way Britain viewed the cultural range and offerings of baking, and for inspiring home bakers encouraged by the diverse roster of contestants.
Ms. Lawson, 66, who was a columnist for The New York Times in the early 2000s, has long been a star of culinary culture, with best-selling cookbooks and television appearances, in a career that has spanned decades.
When “How to Eat,” the cookbook that helped kick off her culinary career, was published in 1998, it featured ingredients that were not popular at the time, including avocado, pomegranate and quinoa.
In 2020, Ms. Lawson demonstrated a recipe from her cookbook “Cook, Eat, Repeat” on her BBC television show of the same name that included a dish of cauliflower and banana peels, an ingredient traditionally used in Bengali cuisine.
“I certainly didn’t expect newspaper headlines about it!” she told The Times in 2021. “It’s hard to overcome the cultural assumptions about what is and is not edible, and to start eating what we have customarily regarded as waste.”
Ms. Lawson recently celebrated 25 years of her classic baking book, “How to Be a Domestic Goddess.” Ian Katz, the chief content officer at Channel 4, said her addition to the show was “the marriage of two great British icons.”
Christine Hauser is a Times reporter who writes breaking news stories, features and explainers.
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