Colloca would not be drawn on a withering review of her new ABC television series, Silvia's Italian Table, in which Razer took sharp aim at the glossy, half-hour cooking show set in a cliff-top designer mansion.

Razer wrote in her review for the Daily Review website: "This show is not simple and true, but complicated and deluded. Sure, the recipes are fine, but it's impossible to enjoy celebrities eating 10,000 calories apiece on a 'simple' cliff top that few people in the nation can afford."

The show also features celebrity guests discussing personal topics with Colloca, which is intended to show a more intimate side of their public personas as they knead gnocchi.

But far from warming Razer's cockles, she described the seemingly innocuous cooking show as "a weekly half-hour instruction in self-hatred".

Razer wrote: "To be even, Colloca does not seem to hate herself. Nor should she. She is tall, striking and apparently lives on about a jillion dollars' worth of absolute beachfront reserve. She is also able to fund tonnes of the finest farina and hectares of premium b-roll, in which she features, always in slow motion, often in a glorious Tuscan meadow and frequently with a blurry, ancient labourer hauling crops in the foreground as she twirls a bit of Genovese basil in her manicure. Such a tableau should be generally unlawful, but seriously criminal when it features a woman over 35. I am aware this may seem 'sexist', but so do whimsical flowers and withered straps of calico on the adult female head. Act your age, not your dress size."

Privately, Colloca is understood to have laughed off Razer's stinging review, telling friends she was glad Razer had "gotten the bitterness off her chest".

Bitter? Perhaps, says Razer, who told Fairfax Media's Private Sydney column: "I do not really understand 'bitter' in any context outside the arugula in my rustic, Tuscan vegetable patch. What is 'bitter'? If bitter is a profound dissatisfaction with increasingly unequal wealth distribution and the mindless celebration of same on a tin-pot show made by persons with about the same screen performance skills as I have, then, probably, I'm bitter."

ABC head of factual television, Steve Bibb, defended the program, issuing a statement on Tuesday afternoon: "The ABC is very proud of Silvia's Italian Table. Silvia Colloca and the producers have delivered a refreshing take on this genre. We look forward to seeing Ken Done, Magda Szubanski and Matt Moran join Silvia tonight. Helen Razer is entitled to an opinion."

However Razer's invective was firmly aimed at the ABC for making such a show, telling PS: "You think it is OK in 2016 to spend my money on a half-hour of fatuous property porn?

"The vast majority of Australians are feeling the pinch of an ongoing financial crisis, of the sort, we are largely agreed, produced by the ultra-financialisation of real estate. No millennial can afford a home.

"I am old and I cannot afford a home. Homelessness is rife as is mortgage stress ... It is inappropriate to the era and the spirit of the people to serve us up a big old gob of absolute beachfront elitism. It sickens me."

The series was shot "on location" at a hired home on Sydney's Northern Beaches, however it is not far from the real-life cliff-top home Colloca shares with actor Richard Roxburgh in Newport, which they purchased over a year ago and features equally impressive, and expensive, seaside views.

Silvia's Italian Table screens at 8pm on Thursdays on ABC.