Roasted by Dan the man
ANOTHER week, another food show. The latest Great British Bake Off, with its cast of amateurs (or not so amateur these days, it seems) debuted a few days back and now it’s the turn of the professionals, in GREAT BRITISH MENU (BBC2)
This is the show in which established chefs compete to cook at a banquet for those “ordinary citizens” who have been honoured by the Queen and, far more than its gentler baking counterpart, this is cooking as a competitive sport.
The message you take from it is that food preparation is something that should never be tried in the home: the galleys looked more like chemistry labs than kitchens.
No jokes about soggy bottoms around here. Indeed, the air was one of subtle menace and competitors, Adam Handling, Michael Bremner and Ally McGrath, visibly sagged when judge Daniel Clifford, a two Michelin-star chef and past GBM winner appeared.
Has he had media training in ominous pauses and an ability to make pretty trivial pronouncements sound like a sentence from a hanging judge? Commenting on Michael’s controversial use of birch sap, he gave him a look that at other times would have sent him to the scaffold and intoned, “If you’re putting it in a dish... it needs to be there for a reason.”
That told him. All three men, who gave every impression of being able to hold their own in a professional, noisy kitchen, with hot plates and junior staff constantly on the boil, quailed before him.
The mission was to demonstrate British food’s recent transformation which boiled down to making the kind of thing you would find in many restaurants today as opposed to a roast with boiled vegetables, which is what they used to serve.
All three chefs came up with something wildly inventive which those of us who eat in restaurants rather than cook in them would be entranced by: Adam created a first course called Boarding Passes Ready, utilising products from all over the British isles, Michael produced a Beet Grove Garden and Ally came up with Guts and Glory.
In presentation alone Adam, who served his course in little Union flag-decorated cases, won hands down – he did in the cooking, too, as he won with eight out of 10, while the other two scored sixes.
It was all very macho, posturing stuff (there have not been many female contestants since the show kicked off a decade ago and you can see why) but it does highlight how far British cuisine has come in the last few decades. Of burnt Brussels sprouts, there was not so much as a whiff.
Queen Victoria got around rather more than she is given credit for. First we see her exchanging glances with Lord Melbourne on ITV’s classy Victoria and then last night, 50 odd years into her reign and on the other side of Albert, as it were, there she was, entertaining foreign gentlemen in RIPPER STREET (BBC2).
This being a very different era he was referred to as “Victoria’s brown right arm.” That’s something else that’s changed in Britain as well as the food: such casual racism comes across as shocking, as indeed the producers intend it to be.
This was the second part of the story about the murder of an Indian lawyer and I won’t name names for those watching on iPlayer, but the series does wallow in unalloyed gloom. It kicked off with a suicide and then got more depressing. Give me competitive chefs any day.