Cheating at food
Richard Sennett
‘Ecraser l’inf&me!’ Voltaire proclaimed in his war on corrupt priests and crooked government officials. Delia’s Smith’s new book How to Cheat at Cooking opens up a whole new field of infamy: the culinary crime. As in 18th-century politics, so in 21st-century cuisine, it’s the public who gets cheated.
Madame Smith’s sassy title is meant to suggest you can get away with using frozen or canned ingredients and still make good food; the sassiness is a piece of nonsense. All cooks use store-prepared ingredients of one sort or another — pasta, ground coffee and ice-cream, to name just a few. It’s a question of which prepared ingredients you use and how you use them.
Madame Smith’s way is to employ packaged food for all the basics, and fresh ingredients for garnish or to add a bit of taste. Her use of packaged ingredients is cunning rather than cheating; she tells the reader which brands to use for each. As exercises in product placement, her recipes are a supermarket’s dream, but the dishes which result are anything but the stuff of dreams; after trying out a few of these recipes, I don’t think I’ve ever tasted such bland food.
Here’s how it works in making ‘Good Old Shepherd’s Pie’. You take 175g of readyprepared diced mixed carrot/swede (Tesco) and fry it with four tablespoons of frozen diced onions. You then add 400g of tinned minced lamb (M&S). Over this mush you lay 16 discs of ‘Aunt Bessie’s Homestyle’ frozen mashed potato. (Why ‘Aunt Bessie’s’? One brand of frozen mashed potato is pretty much indistinguishable from any other.) The fresh ingredients are a few thyme leaves, though these are ‘temporarily out of stock’ at my local M&S each week, and strips of leek; Madame S. uses the white bottoms of the leeks rather than the tastier chopped tops. To finish it off, she then sprinkles on some ready-grated Cheddar. The result is fuel rather than food. You’d do better simply to buy a dish entirely ready-made. (Dare I suggest a product placement that is more upmarket? Waitrose.) Madame Smith is, of course, laughing all the way to the bank. The book is flying off the shelves at both supermarkets and bookstores, and the question is why? Of course, as ‘Delia’, this brand has long been a British institution, and Madame Smith once indeed could cook; the moussaka recipe offered in Book One of How to Cook, for instance, is clever and surprising. One reason for the popularity of her bland turn lies in an interview she gave last week. ‘I think I will have performed a great service if I can make it possible for families to sit round and eat a meal together; that’s my mission.’ To be sure, silly as well as self-serving; the family strictly following her commands would be careening from one supermarket to another to get the right brands. But the hype makes a particular promise, which is that if you don’t have to think much about the food then you free up more quality time for the family at table. Pure leisure defines this promise of quality time: no stress, no hassle, no effort. The appeal to time-short families is obvious, and the ‘Delia’ brand forms part of a burgeoning leisure industry whose other brands sell release and escape. But her shtick is unlikely to give families much to share, whereas the craft of cooking a meal together — with all its banter, its accidents, disappointments and not-halfbad successes — is one of the most sociable pleasures known to man. ‘Delia’ has cheated families of that.
The ultimate infamy of How to Cheat at Cooking seems to me, though, that this is a manual for obesity-training. The products she’s flogging are not particularly fattening in themselves; rather, a cookbook which teaches people to shop by brand label rather than substance accustoms them to stop thinking about what they put in their mouths. Madame Smith has taken a step further than earlier writers of simple recipes; in this book she removes the necessity of people thinking about what they are buying at the point of sale. The legion of fat boys and girls in Britain is one inevitable result of parents shopping and cooking in a mindless way; children are particularly prone to respond to the floating associations aroused by brand-label advertising.
So, like Voltaire, I urge you to ‘écraser l’inf&me!’ Rip off the cellophane packaging, command the butcher to make your lamb mince lean, mash your own potatoes no matter how lumpy — it gives the family something to argue about — and, above all, compost this book!
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