I’m not a massive fan of cookery programmes, that much is true. I can tolerate the ‘food porn’ produced by Nigella, enjoy Rachel Allen occasionally and like watching Ramsey tear through the kitchen when he’s on the box. My favourite cookery programme by a country mile was anything involving the late Keith Floyd. One of the reasons I love to watch him cook is because it was all about the food. With Floyd there was no ego, just simple quality food.
My problem generally with cookery on TV is that 90% of the time it’s not actually about cooking. The chefs are selling you a lifestyle. Nigella’s programmes serve nothing more than to show us how much she likes food. Well I can kind of guess that by looking at her not-so-snake-hips. Rachel shows us that when friends pop over we can just rustle something up out of the blue. Jamie Oliver’s Naked Chef programme no different, armed with a group of actors as ‘friends’, Oliver tried to sell us the lifestyle of mates constantly popping over for ‘nibbles’. Even Ramsey with his”chips, baking tray, 180 for 25mins – done” style of cooking is trying to tell us that cooking is no drama whatsoever.
The thing is, for most people cooking is a drama. It’s easy for Ramsey who for years (maybe not so much now) was at the top of his game, to tell us normal folk how to cook and eat but the fact of the matter is that it’s not that simple. Sometimes the last thing that we want to be doing after a 9 hour day at work is to start faffing around with 150 ingredients just to make an end result that could have been made quicker, simpler and cheaper.
Take my collection of recipe books as an example. Over the years I’ve either bought or been given many a recipe book and between my Girlfriend and I we’ve got books from Nigella, Oliver, Ramsey and Rhodes. If you’re brave enough to delve into one of them and actually pick a recipe, standby for plenty of headscratching once you reach the supermarket. I spent most of my time looking for ingredients that I’d never even heard of in order to bring a little bit more flavour to a dish. Well I smoke 20 cigarettes a day and to be honest, my palate isn’t good enough to justify pouring in all the extras.
You want to know what the best recipe book is that I own? It 1000 beginners recipes. It’s A5 size and it cost me a fraction of the price of the celebrity books. It doesn’t add unnecessary ingredients and there are no pictures but it’s written in a clear and concise way that I can easily follow.
And that’s my problem with celebrity chefs, this country doesn’t need to learn how to cook Beef bourguignon, we need to learn how to cook simple meals from scratch. Unfortunately, it’s a lot cheaper and less time consuming for people to buy processed food rather than cook a real meal.
Enter Masterchef: The Professionals. I’d never seen the programme before but found myself watching it last week. The format is simple, three established chefs per episode have to produce three dishes to the two judges. The two judges are Gregg Wallace, a man who made a fortune selling fruit and veg and is now a self styled ‘ingredients expert’. Yep, you read that correctly – ingredients expert. Surely thats the same as asking a Primark worker to be a ‘fashion expert’. Anyway, Wallace is joined by Michel Roux Jr, someone who’s credentials are almost as pretentious as his name. Born in England he is a two star Michelin star chef who followed in his father’s footsteps to cookery but did exactly as Ramsey and Marco Pierre White did – that is to say he pissed off over to France at the first opportunity for a couple of years, only to return to England and spend the rest of his career telling Brits how shit their own cooking is.
My problem with the show is the way that Wallace and Roux present themselves whilst judging. Think less Gordan Ramsey, more Lock stock and two smoking barrels. I don’t know who thought that it was a good idea to have these muppets parading around a kitchen wearing frowns and breathing down the necks of the chefs, but whoever it is really should have a re-think. If that’s what Masterchef has come to now, why not go whole hog and replace Roux Jr and Wallace with Ray Winstone and Danny Dyer? “Too much salt you slaaaaaggg”, the BBC could even ask Guy Ritchie to direct it
theoriginaljj.
Picture courtesy of the BBC
Leave a comment