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Celebrity chefs
Culinary zombies that ravage our airways.
Is there anyone else out there who is sick, to the pit of their stomach, of celebrity chefs? A relatively recent phenomenon, the unholy alliance of gastronomy and celebrity appears to have slowly conquered the globe, or at least annexed TV schedules.
Turn on the telly at any time of the day or night and a quick flick through the channels will reveal someone cooking, talking about cooking or selling something needed for cooking.
Like most dangerous ideologies, the insatiable appetite for haute cuisine began fairly innocently. The superbly named Fanny Cradock got the ball rolling on the BBC back in the 50’s before Martha Stewart and Delia Smith took up the baton. It was all innocuous stuff with practical instruction on the basics of cookery, using easy-to-follow techniques and recipes. How all that would change.
Keith Floyd was perhaps the first true celebrity chef– the grandfather of the genre. An entertaining rascal, the recently departed Floyd really did love food, and drink, and the combination of both made for superb viewing. His winning blend of exotic locations, al fresco cooking and the consummation of copious amounts of whatever local brew came to hand created some unforgettable television. Unfortunately, Floyd’s deserved success ultimately spawned the current faceless crop of culinary zombies that ravage our airways.
Ramsey, Oliver, Rhodes, Blumenthal, Fearnley-Whittingstall and the Hairy Bikers- a bunch of absolute spoofers. Unlike their fore bearers, the aforementioned teach us little about actual cooking or get into any entertaining scrapes abroad while inebriated. In the main, the modern day celebrity cook’s speciality can only be described as food porn. Preposterous, unpronounceable ingredients blended together in the most unnecessary manner to create dainty dishes that resemble wedding hats. These men are not alchemists, they are frauds. If they all perished at a culinary convention after an unfortunate flame cooking experiment gone disastrously wrong, would we be any worse off?
After disappointingly discovering that the shelves of the local Super Valu remain largely bereft of ducks liver, foie gras or quail eggs, the latest scam used to pull the wool over the eyes of the great unwashed is the campaign, or crusade. After flogging all the cookbooks and saucepans in Christendom, a crusade is required to focus flagging interest and any laudable old nonsense will do. Growing your own vegetables, buying local organic foods, highlighting the plight of the humble battery chicken and finding the best local restaurant in the country all qualify as worthy struggles that will allow clueless cooks to cling to the public’s consciousness for another season.
Our home grown produce, or course, is equally lamentable. From the futile ramblings of Richard Corrigan, who forcefully proclaims the regional delights of roasted badger’s rectum to the more charming Cavan boy-next-door Neven Maguire who, whatever he cooks, the only lasting impression is of his unlimited wardrobe of sensible, festive jumpers. Then there’s The Restaurant, which attempts to create chefs out of Irish celebrities that you never heard of. The RTÉ executives who dreamed this up will have to answer to a higher force for introducing Tom Doorley to the good people of Ireland. A personal favourite is Rachel Allen, who combines the inane with the incomprehensible. She appears to have learned how to speak from an Emily Bronte novel and so butter is pronounced as ‘batter’ and water ‘wooter’, cut becomes ‘cat’. Her latest campaign/venture is designing signature sandwiches, or at least I think that’s what she said, for a well known sambo seller. How many years were spent slaving away under a Parisian gourmet master chef to produce these delights? As Mark Twain’s great, great granddaughter Shania memorably quipped, that don’t impress me much.
By: Brian Bolger
