Her acrimonious split from Charles Saatchi has hogged the headlines, but Nigella Lawson says she hates conflict.

The TV cook and "domestic goddess" said she avoids confrontation in a Radio Times interview to promote her show The Taste.

The interview, alongside her new co-stars - chef Ludo Lefebvre and food maverick Anthony Bourdain - took place six weeks before ­allegations of Lawson's drug use emerged in the fraud trial of her former personal assistants, Francesca and Elisabetta Grillo.

The sisters were acquitted and Lawson ­admitted during the trial she took cocaine with her late husband John Diamond when he found out he had terminal cancer, and in 2010 when she claimed she was being "subjected to intimate terrorism" by her former husband Mr Saatchi. Police are to review her admission she took the Class A drug.

Lawson said she used "food to bring harmony, for whatever reason".

Talking about her US TV show, which is being broadcast in the UK on Channel 4, she told the magazine: "What I liked, not being terribly confrontational as a person, is that because you taste everything blind, you're never making any judgments on a person and you're just talking about the food."

Lawson, an executive producer on the show, described as MasterChef meets The Voice, added: "So much of reality TV is the theatre of humiliation or in some sense the culture of the breast-heaving back story, so to have a food competition that is actually about the food is ... rather pleasant."