Gwyneth Paltrow called into the Rachael Ray show from her home in London to defend herself against the New York Times’ accusations that she didn’t write her own cookbook.
'Every single recipe in the book I came up with and I cooked on the spot,' Paltrow told Rachael.
The 39-year-old, who is rarely spotted with a hair out of place, was sporting bed-head hair and a bare face.
She told Rachael in the broadcast, which was shown today at 10am ET: 'I'm in my pyjamas.'
Before adding with a grin: 'I've got a glass of wine,' and then wielding the glass in front of the camera. This is a Gwen I can get in to. T shirt, messy hair and vino. My kinda girl.
Paltrow’s cookbook, My Father’s Daughter, features recipes from blueberry pavlova to chicken and dumplings, all of which she says she created herself.
'The recipes were inspired by an amazing salad that I had somewhere … a chef friend that had taught me something and this is my version of it and I would do it from scratch by myself and in the kitchen,' she said.The Times article, 'I Was a Cookbook Ghostwriter,' accuses many celebrity chefs of hiring ghostwriters to create their recipes with little input from the chefs themselves.
Author Julia Moskin includes interviews with the alleged ghostwriters for Ray and Paltrow and writes: 'The days when a celebrated chef might wait until the end of a distinguished career and spend years polishing the prose of the single volume that would represent his life’s work are gone.'
Paltrow and Ray disagreed with the article, arguing that they did not use ghostwriters.
'The NYTimes has opened up the discussion on what a true writer is and to me it is the person who is telling the story,' Ray said.
The author of 20 cookbooks, Ray wants the Times to apologise for the article: 'I so strongly agree this is how I spend a lot of my time at home, the little bit of time I have with my family I spend in front of one of these little notebooks.
'And in front of the computer and it sort of takes away from all that to not be able to call that writing, of course, is writing.'
Despite defending Moskin’s article as accurate and fair, the Times told ABC News: 'It did not say that someone else wrote Rachael Ray’s, Jamie Oliver’s or Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbooks.
'It said that they, like many other chef-authors, had help.'
