ONE WEEK HAS elapsed since the season finale of
MasterChef, the BBC's cooking show
sans pareil(I think it's okay to bust out the French here – we are talking about food), and I'm to be found staring at my Le Creuset roasting dish, Tierra Negra earthernware stewing pot, multi-purpose blender, spatula, spoons and knives.
In front of the telly and with my laptop on my knee, I recently slalomed through the cookware section of eBay at top speed, credit card in one hand, remote control in the other, cheered along by John Torode and his skinhead co-presenter whose name now escapes me. I’m wondering if I can get my money back.
The doorbell never stopped ringing last week as I took receipt of cookware in boxes and signed on digital pads. I tore those boxes open, unveiled another piece of kit and arranged it around the kitchen, just so. But now the series is over and half my ingredients are wilting in the bottom drawer of the fridge; the other half huddled together on the top shelf of the press, and none of the dry goods seem to want to commune with anything in the fridge, and nobody on television seems to want to lend a hand. My polished hob stares me down; daring me to sully it. I am stumped. Cooking doesn’t get tougher than this.
For the most part, reality shows leave me cold. The goals of contestants are not my goals; not in my real life nor, more importantly, in my secret, interior life. My fantasies don't involve ballroom dancing, hotel management or the rape of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah(that's right, Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, not Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah, which is itself a violent crime). But in much the same way that flat-footed, matronly women in their 40s can sometimes be found fingering the fabric of tiny ballet pumps thoughtfully, I have always harboured a secret, unexpressed ambition to be a chef.
I'm sure anyone who makes a good omelette shares this dream of mine; for us, it exists on a purely conceptual level and is never going to happen because we won't ever will it into being – deep inside we know we're not good enough cooks to make it work. Still, watching MasterChef, we can suspend our disbelief and imagine it could be so if only we had the time/earthernware pots/dazzling array of ingredients. MasterChef's greatest trick is in making you feel that by watching others cooking, you are taking a baby step along the road to becoming a chef yourself.
Before, I never knew about the Poularde de Bresse, or that a wee crepe sat between the fillet of beef and the pastry constituent in a Beef Wellington for the pastry to stay dry and crisp. I have not made or tasted either of these dishes and probably never will, but that doesn't matter.
It was by no means a perfect viewing experience. Like many, I had difficulty watching heaped forkfuls of food veering towards the dark recesses of John Torode’s gaping maw. Often his cruel mouth would snap shut hastily, leaving a lone strand of wilted spinach to dangle untasted against the chin. The other fellow definitely lacked the tools to describe adequately what he was experiencing and sometimes offered the impression he was at a strip club and not in a kitchen at all. - Phoar. Get in.
There’s only so many times you can hear about the loveliness of the (meat x) giving way to the green-ness of the (vegetable y), and then being off-set by the acidity of the (sauce z) before a degree of tedium sets in, but when it was good, it was great. Watching people crying about food that you will never be able to taste shouldn’t have the power to affect you, but down the years we have been conditioned to accept this limitation across many formats on our television screens, and I was emotionally julienned last week.
This trend of watching people watching other people doing something is a broadcasting standard – a symptom of the desperate search for content. Some shows have elevated it to a kind of performance art – take Football First. The entire premise of this much-imitated five-hour weekend broadcast on Sky Sports entails watching presenter Jeff Stelling and four former professionals watch games you'll never see, shrieking about goals that don't affect you being scored in games between teams you don't care for, in leagues of no importance.
Joan Didion famously remarked about Los Angeles that there was "no there there", but could she handle the art installation also known as Football First?
The reason for it is simple – Sky can’t show these games but people want to know how they are going, and Sky want people to go to them to find out. They can’t just print the scores on screen because that’s called Ceefax. So they get people on telly to watch the games and we watch those people watching. And yet it is not for nothing that Jeff Stelling rhymes with compelling. Besides, this is far from the laziest TV format.
That award goes to the rolling news, that shower of wastrels who actually want to charge you to provide them with all their content so that they can provide it directly back to you. “Tell us what you think,” implores the post-collegiate news anchor in the starter suit – “Text 53000 with your thoughts!” (Strap fades up bearing the tariff – 75 cent per text). And so, back to lunch, and I am in the right place to be hungry. I have the cherry-red set of non-stick pans and slicers, a mortar and pestle hewn from Sicilian sandstone and a shelf full of ingredients. It seems that everything is in place. And yet, I cannot escape the feeling that some vital ingredient is missing . . .
One cheese sandwich coming up.