Challenge Nigella
Petronella Wyatt
It is time for me to reveal myself in my true colours, as incognito heroines used to say in Georgette Heyer novels or secret agents in Cold War thrillers. Alas, Petronetla Wyatt is not a pseudonym for Grace Jones, nor am I anything more than the common-or-garden spy who occasionally and shamefully listens through doors. Nope. But the caterpillar on the lettuce leaf that was me has turned into the nasturtium flower in the gourmet salad.
I have become a cook. Obviously this is only a night job. But, nevertheless, although I will never be Anatole in the kitchen, I now wield a jolly respectable whisk. This all began when, you may recall, I wrote about cooking a soufflé. My brother in South Africa scoffed rudely when I made this claim. I concede it did seem rather outlandish as I was wearing fourinch heels at the time.
So he challenged me to cook one. Of course he could have chosen one of the easier varieties like plain cheese or even chocolate. But, no, he chose the one that makes every chef tremble in their white coats: the smoked haddock. The smoked haddock is the Cresta run of souffles, the Mount Everest of culinary confections. It involves hours of hard labour and extreme personal injury. This is because you have to shred the haddock straight after cooking the wretched fish. As the haddock is then about 90 degrees, most of it gets dropped on the floor while you run around shrieking and holding your burnt fingers.
But I managed to do the bally thing. The soufflé rose, with the aid of good old baking powder, and from it emanated the unmistakable scent of, erm, smoked haddock. The centre was moist, which is how it should be, and so were my brother's eyes at having so grievously misjudged me. Perhaps the soufflé was such a triumph because I had been cooking them twice a week — chocolate, Grand Marnier, cheese, spinach, vanilla and, natch, smoked haddock.
In fact I have been cooking everything. I bought myself ten cookery books. I began with sauces, stocks and stews. I then graduated on to soups — pumpkin, pea and mint, vichyssoise, consommé, tomato, asparagus, cucumber. After that it was main courses. I have learnt Hungarian cuisine — about time, as my dear mother says — Asian cuisine, Indian cooking, fish recipes, cakes and biscuits, pavlovas. Shall I boast? Yes, I shall. Many of the recipes were actually changed by me or were of my own invention.
What I now lead up to is this. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence or imagination, and, of course, an interest in food, can become a good cook. There is no mystique to it. What puzzles me is how long it took someone like Jamie Oliver to learn to cook in the first place. I can give him a run for his baking dishes. I might even take on my friend Marco Pierre White, as long as he promises to put away his cleavers. As for Rick Stein he can give up and go home.
Of course the most brilliant celeb chef of all is Nigella Lawson. Do not mistake me. I think the girl not only pulchritudinous beyond belief but also extraordinarily intelligent, with a gift for writing. She has made the great public of Britain and America believe that only a genius can make a birthday cake. As she does this while attired like Ava Gardner, purring charm, we are only too willing to believe her.
I am afraid that I look nothing like Ava Gardner and envy Nigella her savvy in making cooking sexy to women again, for the first time since the Sixties. But what about her actual cooking? I mean the dishes themselves? What do they taste like? Nigella and I have only met in passing, thus I have never been one of the fortunate few to taste her own food in her own house. But, I dare ask, can it really taste so stratospherically better than mine? A dinner of three courses, with a series of independent judges to pronounce on the food. No doubt Nigella would waft in wearing one of those new Dior Thirties screen-goddess evening gowns and I wouldn't stand a chance in my last year's Joseph suit. But then again you never know. Come on, Nigella. Accept my challenge and name the day. You don't want people to think you are scared of an amateur, do you?
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