Television
High living
Simon Hoggart
Some years ago I had a wonderful free- bie, on Concorde to New York with the famous British chefs who had devised the Plane's new menus. I had never met chefs en masse before, and it was fascinating to eavesdrop. They hated three kinds of peo- ple in particular. In third place, a certain food and wine writer whom I won't name. Second, their customers for myriad failings, especially making reservations and not turning up. At the pinnacle of their hit list was Anton Mosimann, the Swiss chef. He had been unable to join us on the flight, so there was ample opportunity to carp. I asked one very, very famous chef what was wrong with Mr Mosimann who, on the three occasions I have met him, has been the soul of courtesy. The gist was that he talked a good meal on television, but was compared to them — an inferior cook. I said I had enjoyed his 'winter pudding' which had been served during the flight. My new friend glowered at me. 'You ate eet?' he asked.
In fact I have twice eaten meals from his kitchen, and both were memorable. But what sticks in my mind more is a series he did for BBC Television some years ago. He was billeted on a family in Sheffield. The father was a bus driver who enjoyed cook- lug, and the brief was to provide a full Sun- day lunch costing less than £5, not a lot of money even then. Mosimann prepared coq au vin followed by his bread and butter Pudding, which looked good enough to eat straight off the screen. The family's con- tented remark, often repeated, was 'Ee, Anton, that's champion!', which is still a catch-phrase in my own house when any- one serves up anything delicious. The programme was exactly what a tele- vision food show should be. The recipes were practical and within anyone's compe- tence. It emphasised the social pleasure of eating together which is the only point of Preparing good food. And it looked so scrumptious, you couldn't wait to make it yourself.
These three rules don't apply to all the cookery programmes (there's now a cable channel which does food all afternoon). For example, I have never ever seen any- thing on Masterchef that I would dream of trYing. It's the culinary equivalent of Loyd Grossman's vowels, impossibly convoluted and deeply unattractive. Nobody wants to eat filo parcels of Stilton and celery with pine nuts, served on a coulis of gooseberry and blackcurrant, let alone cook such an unnecessary dish. (I invented that, but it's bangers and mash compared to most Mas- terchef concoctions.) Delia Smith is fine, and the cliché is true: if you follow her recipes to the letter, you'll get it right. But she misses the social ele- ment. She makes cookery look duller than grouting. Imagine a dinner party at her house. You make the obvious feeble joke: `Is this a Delia, then? Ha, ha', and the con- versation settles down to the promotion of prospects for Norwich City. Perhaps I'm wrong; maybe things liven up when the gorilla-gram arrives, but the programme doesn't communicate that.
Rick Stein (A Taste of the Sea) and Gary Rhodes (Rhodes Around Britain) are okay and communicate real enthusiasm. The recipes also have the most important of all ingredients from the chefs point of view: they are so complicated you are forced to buy the book. Rhodes is laddish, Stein slightly camp. In both cases I find it easier to steal the ideas than follow the recipes in detail; for one thing Rhodes's quantities often seem to be wrong.
My favourite food show is TV Dinners (Channel 4), which has just ended its cur- rent series. It's presented by Hugh Fearn- ley-Whittingstall, who possesses the attractive, laid-back diffidence taught at only the priciest of public schools. Each week the programme follows two amateur cooks preparing for special occasions. They're all honkers, which makes them riv- eting. HFW has hair which last saw a comb around the time of the Silver Jubilee, and a shirt so rumpled that I assumed they sewed him into it for the series, until he switched to a blue one in Part Two. His gentle and unassuming manner gives the cooks' lunacy full rein.
Last week we saw a couple of friends who were obsessed with chilli peppers and made an all-chilli three-course meal for their wedding anniversaries. Of the dessert, `It's a refreshing lime sorbet, and if I'm not mistaken the red bits are chilli,' said HFW, drily. He chats to the victims too. 'The hot- ter they can eat a chilli, the more manly they think they are. It's not going to be a very romantic evening,' said one wife. The other's first words after her first mouthful were 'Can I have a tissue?'
The second half was an Australian woman living in London who orchestrates her dinner parties, telling guests what to wear, which wine to bring, and how to behave. 'She's a dominatrix, a control freak,' said one. 'I'm frightened to be alone with her, quite frankly,' said another. 'I'm a legend in my own living-room,' she replied. The main course was squid tenderised by pulped kiwi fruit. In spite of these horrors it looked like a fun evening. HFW smiled amiably in the kitchen, chopping things. The show fills all three criteria: you want to cook the food, you could cook the food, and you'd like to be at the party to eat it.
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