Bad Food Britain: How A Nation Ruined Its Appetite. Joanna Blythman
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a practical skill. You are watching because you want to learn so that you can try it out.
Delia’s style of presentation was that of an ever so slightly glamorous domestic science teacher: encouraging, straightforward, business-like and not at all show-offy. She assumed the traditional female cookery demonstrator’s pose, face on to the camera, standing behind a worktop covered with basic kitchen equipment and a small sea of glass bowls, and she took viewers through a few recipes with thoroughness and detail, flagging up possible variations on the theme. She communicated her knowledge of cookery in a factual way, taking nothing for granted, stopping regularly to explain or introduce a new ingredient or the usage of a less common item of kitchen equipment. Her attitude was not a patronizing ‘Poor you, haven’t you heard of balsamic vinegar? Oh do keep up!’ but an unthreatening ‘Here’s an interesting Italian vinegar that I like and I think you might like too’. Delia came over more like an approachable member of the local Women’s Institute than a scion of some elite society of food connoisseurs. She did not fit the mould of the distinguished, upper-class, English cookery writers, such as the wonderfully acerbic memsahib Elizabeth David, or the erudite, well-travelled Jane Grigson. They had performed a stalwart service by helping to drag British food out of its post-war austerity, but they influenced a select audience of people rather like themselves. Whether or not she consciously set out to do so, Delia Smith became a food democrat whose mission was to broaden the food knowledge and cooking capability of the great mass of ordinary Britons. As such she developed a strongly female following who found her recipes realistic and do-able.
Out there in Middle Britain, the Delia effect was tangible. In the 1980s and early 1990s, it was always a great relief when visiting family, friends and acquaintances with a less than impressive record on the cooking front to hear the phrase ‘I didn’t know what to make so I just made a dish from Delia Smith’. That usually ominous introduction from the nervous, unconfident cook ‘I’ve never made this before … I hope it’s all right’ was instantly less perturbing when followed up with ‘… It’s a Delia recipe’.
By the late 1990s, the Delia brand increasingly became seen as old-fashioned, a bit plodding, in need of lightening up, and out of touch because of its patronage of the unglamorous, primarily female realm of home cooking. Delia had been upstaged by a new generation of TV cooks who fitted in with broadcasters’ notions that food now belonged not in an education, but light entertainment slot. Keith Floyd was the vanguard for this new genre of TV food entertainment. His recipes were rough and inexact, unlike Delia’s meticulously weighed centilitres and grams. An ageing, rakish bon viveur with a diverting line in banter, he appealed to male viewers, to the kind of man who likes to show off his cooking skills at high-profile events but doesn’t like to muck in with everyday domestic cooking. The efficacy of Keith Floyd’s recipes was considered by broadcasters to be secondary to his entertainment value. They liked him because he rescued cookery from what they considered to be a female ghetto. He got out of the studio and cooked up impromptu feasts on boats, in fields, on beaches. He supplied excitement and added value. He did something more than just cook.
Keith Floyd provided a prototype for a new breed of TV cook or ‘celebrity chef’. It was no longer good enough merely to teach people to cook. Celebrity chefs had to offer the viewing public something different, because – and here’s the irony – they now had to appeal to people with little or no interest in food, people who quite possibly had no intention to cook. Consequently, Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson-Wright were not allowed to be just two patrician, middle-aged women with a formidable knowledge of food, but had to be portrayed as PG Wodehouse stereotypes, Two Fat Ladies travelling around, Biggies-style, with a motorbike and side car. The gimmicks abounded. Jamie Oliver had to keep up a constant stream of chippy barrow-boy prattle and slide down banisters to boost ratings figures amongst younger viewers. Nigella Lawson had to look eternally gorgeous and seductive and spout a script heavily overlaid with sexual nuance. These added-value cookery shows demonstrated, yet again, Britain’s traditional lack of conviction that food in its own right merits intelligent interest. The underlying thinking was that cooking is a chore which, in its unadorned form, could not be expected to appeal to British people. It had to be spiced up with a series of innovations if ratings were not to flag. Food and cooking needed something else to sell it: sex, travel, eccentricity, adventure, farce, incessant swearing – anything.
The success of these new-wave food programmes created a mass delusion, the idea that British people were already so sophisticated in their appreciation of good food, and accomplished in the cooking of it, that they had no more elementary lessons to learn. In 1998, Delia Smith had launched a new series, Delia’s How To Cook, a back-to-basics cooking primer aimed at reintroducing Britons living on processed food to the pleasures of cooking. This was blatantly at odds with the assertion that Britain was in the throes of a good food revolution and provoked an outburst from chef Gary Rhodes who attacked How To Cook as ‘Offensive’. ‘I don’t need to be shown what boiling water looks like and I tend to think that the rest of the population don’t need to be shown it now,’ he said. ‘It is insulting to their intelligence.’ Soon after, chef Antony Worrall Thompson jumped on the anti-Delia bandwagon dubbing her ‘the Volvo of cooking’ because he considered that she was reliable but dull.
Delia Smith retaliated, voicing her aversion to celebrity chefs and the whole ‘food as light entertainment’ approach, laying into BBC2’s prime-time popular food show in particular. ‘I will never, ever know, as long as I live, how the BBC or the general public can tolerate Food and Drink,’ she said. Food and Drink was the progenitor of a new strand of live audience programmes in the game show mould. It was made to be undemanding and unintimidating, so presenters who actually knew anything about their subject had to pretend that they were just punters. Those who knew no more than the average citizen were awarded the status of idiot savants and charged with talking garrulously and hyperactively, so reinforcing the British suspicion that anyone who goes on about food is either mad, irrevocably pretentious or downright ridiculous. It was geared to viewers with the attention span of a flea.
Then, in 2003, after selling ten million books, Delia Smith announced her retirement from cookery. She said that she was ‘reciped out’, but fired one last salvo at the massed ranks of celebrity chefs before she went. ‘What’s happened to the amateur cook in the country house? Or that lady down the pub who only the locals knew about and cooked up a storm?’ she asked. Delia’s retirement marked the consignment of any serious attempt to teach Britain practical cooking skills to the dustbin.
The balance of culinary power in Britain has now swung away from the domestic zone, where its keepers were women who passed on their accumulated knowledge with their egos held well in check, to the male zone, where its new luminaries are a bunch of flashy performance artists. The success of these performers is not measured by whether the woman along the road successfully cooked one of their dishes, but by their ratings and book sales.
The focus of food fashion has become more rarefied, arcane and preoccupied with the endless pursuit of novelty; in fact, it is entirely detached from most Britons’ domestic cooking experience. A lot of media attention has been given to Heston Blumenthal, chef of the Fat Duck at Bray and his particular style of cooking – ‘molecular gastronomy’. Mr Blumenthal’s gastronomy is complex, and is best contemplated only by the most seriously skilled chefs, yet his recipes turn up with regularity in programmes and magazines aimed at ordinary people, most of whom seem impressed. Writing in the Evening Standard, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown declared herself to be perplexed by the whole Blumenthal phenomenon: ‘I watched him on TV last week making mashed potatoes – twelve steps, one and a half hours, eight different pots and utensils and an end result that looked like thick soup. Is he taking the mickey?’
Food as a spectator sport has now become a huge industry in Britain. In countries that are feted for their cuisine, such as Italy and France, food has a much lower profile in the media. Weekend newspapers carry a restaurant review, perhaps a profile of a chef, a diary of local food and wine festivals, and the odd recipe. News-stands