Columnists
Four what we are about to receive
James Cary
When I turned on the television one night earlier this year, it was like seeing Bob Dylan playing with an electric blues band at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 when fans booed as their idol appeared to be turning has back on his folk roots. But I was not watching a crime against music, but a felony against food. I sat dumbstruck as Delia reached into a store cupboard and pulled out a tin of minced beef. I shook my head in disbelief as frozen mash was plucked from the freezer to make the topping for a shepherd’s pie (like mash is really hard work). I then lurched as I assumed the world was no longer spinning on its axis. Delia, the nations unofficial cooking czar, had sold out.
But I had also betrayed her. I have been two-timing, well, four-timing her with Jamie, Hugh and Gordon. This may become five-timing should I flirt with Heston when he joins the food ranks of Channel 4. It is a network that likes to be achingly cool. It prides itself on giving platforms to minorities, marginalised voices and alternative views. And yet its comedy is written by and/or stars educated middle-class white men (see Peep Show and IT Crowd). And its four main cooking brands are also middle-aged white men who ruthlessly exploit their media profile to make mountains of money. And who wouldn’t?
Let’s begin with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingshall. He is not only double-barrelled and terribly well-spoken, but his quest for fresh food continually unearths extraordinary-looking older whiter men with strange beards, bad hair and terrible teeth. His friends could not be less hip. But for Hugh it’s all about the food. Natural, organic, home-grown or wild, and above all, seasonal. He seems to have a hotline to Mother Nature herself, if she existed. He is essentially pagan – and Hugh would probably not eschew the title – but he also celebrates the abundance of nature, which Christians should also celebrate. God didn’t just make plants, but seed-bearing ones. He created seasons and, try as we might, we can’t actually make anything grow.
But will Hugh fill the Delia void and teach you how to cook? Not really (unless you can butcher your own pigs, grow your own junipers, and deep-fry your own parsnip crisps in hemp oil).
You could try some cooking karaoke with Gordon Ramsay, a man with more pent-up energy than a loaded, cocked blunderbuss. But for him, it’s not really about cooking or food, either. Gordon is about excellence. Bad food physically offends him. Bad restaurants send him into fits of rage. Food must be as good as it can be – and turn a profit. Ultimately, he’s not pagan, like Hugh, but Protestant in work ethic, if there is such a thing (maybe he picked it up at his old football club, Rangers). But unless you want to learn how to make a Caesar salad at knifepoint (which he also picked up at Rangers), I wouldn’t ask him for cooking lessons.
Don’t even bother with Heston Blumenthal. Let’s face it. He’s not a chef; he’s a scientist. For him, food should be a multi-sensory experience. If one needs a conical flask to make scrambled eggs, so be it. And if those eggs taste better with plum jam and oxtail, then he’ll put them all together on a muffin (cooked on a Bunsen burner, naturally with garlic butter made in a fume cupboard). So unless you have access to your child’s chemistry set, cooking with Heston will be a frustrating affair.
For proper cooking lessons, we must to turn to Jamie Oliver who’d like to teach the world to cook. With the passion of John Wesley, he’s trying to convert the whole of Rotherham to home-cooked classics. But for him, it’s not just about food preparation and eating well. It’s not just about being in tune with the seasons, executing meals to perfection and drying your salad in the Hadron Collider – food is about people. Cooking together. Eating together. He is surely right to point out that what you eat and how you eat it affects how you live and how your kids behave and relate to others. After all, what hope do we have of any kind of national, or even ecclesiastical, unity when many of us eat bad convenience salty fatty food all alone?
With Our Lady Delia of the Tinned Goods Aisle teaching us how to make meals from things in frozen bags, Jamie may just be the lone voice in the wilderness.
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