Has Pamela Anderson written the nuttiest ever cookbook?

Pamela Anderson has been many things in her life. Baywatch babe, rock wife, sex bomb, magician’s assistant, fantasy figure, mother, lover, film star, dedicated vegan, America’s sweetheart, Playboy centrefold, activist, icon and erstwhile celebrity sex-tape star to name a few.

Now, at the age of 57, she has added domestic goddess to her throbbing list of credits by publishing her debut cookbook.

I Love You: Recipes From The Heart is a surprisingly authentic venture featuring more than 80 of Pammy’s favourite tried-and-tested vegan recipes, including a no-bun sweet potato burger, harissa-roasted whole cauliflower, harvest veggie pot pies and a ‘tangy probiotic cabbage’ which she eats every day – yum.

Vegan baking is not for the faint-hearted but our girl gets her organic linen apron on and provides recipes for cakes and biscuits made with plant milk and plant butter, including cinnamon rolls, an almond grapefruit traybake and, yes, My Wedding Cake: a multi-tiered concoction formed of brioche layers, diplomat cream, soaking syrup and wild strawberries.

Pamela has been married six times, so she’s had plenty of opportunity to practise this one. ‘It’s a little rustic sauvage but it’s also delicate and not too sweet,’ she writes, words which are equally true of herself.

Nestled between the recipes are practical hints for the vegan home cook. ‘Helpful tip,’ she writes chirpily in her chapter about baking bread. ‘I use a scale to be more precise.’

For her Green Glow Juice she advises readers to ‘juice using a juicer’ and when making her own flower teas – which include Sensual Blend, Longevity Blend and Beauty Blend varieties – she urges her fellow tea-makers to ‘store the teas in glass jars and don’t forget to label’.

Well, quite. You don’t want to get your Sensual mixed up with your Longevity – that’s how you end up with half a dozen husbands.

In her recipe for cucumber sandwiches, Pamela advises cutting the cucumber into peeled strips instead of the traditional rounds. I don’t know how our dear departed Queen Elizabeth II would have reacted to this sacrilege, but fear it would not involve a damehood for services to teatime treats.

Much of the vegan recipe territory in the savoury chapters was covered by Gwyneth Paltrow in 2013, when she published her clean-eating book, It’s All Good. Pamela even includes her own recipes for Gwyneth classics such as kale crisps and avocado on toast.

Pammy’s twist? She adds curry powder to the kale and shreds sheets of nori seaweed into the avocado mix, because why not at least try to make it taste even worse, right?

However, where the two women really differ is that Pammy brings the crazy in a way that sensible Gwynnie never could. ‘Sourdough has my heart, I like to think of baking bread as like giving birth,’ is one early declaration in I Love You. ‘Teas have grown on me,’ she declares further on. ‘I feel a real connection to the Earth and its medicinal gifts. A garden is redemptive with its moral spaces, reality, courage – a leap of faith.’

That’s quite a lot to lay on a cabbage patch and I’m not talking manure, like some. ‘I love every olive,’ cries Pammy in the introduction to a tapenade recipe, pausing to exult in their ‘wrinkled skins’ before rushing off to cheat on Mr Kalamata with Mr Girolle when making a risotto.

‘Mushrooms are so beautiful. There are so many varieties. There seems to be an intelligence to them,’ she burbles.

She feeds her pet mastiffs Lucky and Lola fruit balls laced with CBD oil to calm them down after travelling – and includes the recipe here. ‘Check with your vet and read the bottle carefully,’ she adds, as well she might.

She believes that dogs absorb their owner’s vibes and vice versa so please, no one mention the word ‘barking’ until we have decided whether Pammy’s recipe for a flower salad is a joke or not. ‘This came from a dream,’ she writes, ‘a single rose served simply as a salad – romantically dressed with olive oil and sumac.’

Actually, Chef Pam is big on roses all round, including them in recipes for dill pickles, chilli beetroots and an olive oil cake.

‘I even bathed my babies in rose petals,’ she writes. But don’t get excited because she means her sons and not her most famous physical attributes, which infamously reached 34DD in their Baywatch heyday.

Handsome olives, Lucky and Lola off their bonces on dope and intelligent mushrooms – what in the name of nutty butter is going on?

It cannot be denied that a molten vein of Pam-tastic eccentricity runs through this book, as thick and impenetrable as the layer of cashew coconut in her ice cream sandwiches. However, this comes as no surprise to those of us who know Pammy – and love her in our own way.

In 2017 I met the self-styled ‘icon’ in Marseille, where she was living while dating French football star Adil Rami, a handsome hunk who was 18 years her junior. Nothing quite prepares one for Pamela in the flesh. As she walked across the French hotel foyer to meet me – a vision in her Betty Boop dress, vegan stilettoes and tousled blonde hair – men just stopped in their tracks and stared.

Over brunch she ignored the fruit platter and wolfed a cow butter croissant while ordering a cow milk cappuccino.

I thought you were vegan! ‘I am a very naughty vegan. I haven’t eaten meat for over 20 years, but I am not strict about veganism because I don’t like depravation of any kind,’ she purred.

I wondered aloud if her infamous implants were vegan, too. ‘I’m not talking about my boobs,’ she said, demolishing another pastry. Funny and friendly, she was easy to like and had an offbeat charm.

After three marriages – to Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee (the father of her sons Brandon and Dylan), to musician Kid Rock and then (twice) to poker player Rick Salomon, Pamela then believed that she and Rami were in it for the long haul.

However, the couple were to split acrimoniously only two years later.

So she moved back to America and consoled herself in the way that only Pamela Anderson can – by marrying twice more in quick succession.

In 2020, she wed her old friend, the Hollywood producer Jon Peters. That lasted for 12 whole days. Later that year, she married Dan Hayhurst. He was the handyman who came to help renovate her property. After 13 months, that marriage was over, too.

At the end of her recipe book, Pamela wistfully writes that she would like to have ‘one last great love affair’ and it would take a heart of stone not to wish her well in this ambitious endeavour. There is no mention of her lovers or myriad husbands in her I Love You cookbook; they are the spectres at the feasts she prepares for her sons and their girlfriends.

For Pamela today is a very different woman from the badboy magnet of yore. The barbed wire tattoos are fading, the implants are MIA while she has ditched the glamour and even stopped wearing make-up.

For this cookbook photoshoot, she is pictured in dungarees and Wellingtons, all rustic sauvage indeed. Here she is in the garden of her Vancouver Island retreat, having deep thoughts.

‘Planting a garden is hope for a blessed tomorrow – it heals what is broken,’ she says. Certainly, Pamela Anderson is a master at crafting her own narrative, you’ve got to give her that. It is what has sustained her in the public eye for nearly four decades in a life that has not always been easy.

She has endured multiple traumas, including being played by Lily James in a Hulu biopic of her life, complete with generously sized prosthetics and risible dentistry.

So let’s applaud this move into glorious bucolic cronedom and celebrate the many interesting ideas in Pamela’s cookbook for the adventurous vegan. She’s got Buddha bowls; she’s got artichoke dips; she’s got pizza salads which are – get this – a pizza base with a salad on top.

She’s even got a recipe for Superfood Warrior Chocolate Chip Cookies which are laced with something called maca root powder. ‘This was known to be eaten by the Vikings to keep up their strength and vitality,’ she writes, while some studies say it improves male semen quality.

As maca (a parsnip-type of root) is native to the high Andes and fertilised by alpaca manure, it seems unlikely that 10th-century Vikings ever partook of its pleasures. However, it was almost certainly in the cookies which Pamela took to the Ecuadorian embassy as a vegan treat for her friend Julian Assange.

Poor Julian! Still, he managed to father two children while living in captivity in an embassy cupboard for two years. So maybe, just maybe, there is something to savour in Pammy’s crazy ways after all.