Has the BBC got a new recipe for success?
The age of saucy cooking is over. Nadiya hussain, the Bake Off star turned BBC presenter, doesn’t do double entendres. You’d be more likely to hear queen of the anti-smut crusaders Mary Whitehouse tell a dirty joke.
When one of the contestants in The Big Family Cooking Showdown announced that she always aimed for ‘perfectly shaped balls’, Nadiya didn’t so much as arch an eyebrow.
As cool and proper as Mary Poppins, she took the comment at face value. The cooks were rolling Swedish meatballs. Of course they would try to make them perfect.
This dish was far from the only one with a continental flavour. The first episode of this Showdown couldn’t have been more nakedly euro-friendly if it had featured German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s favourite recipe for wiener schnitzel.
It wasn’t just Giorgio the Italian judge with his buzzing bumblebee accent, whizzing through lines such as: ‘Ze most important zing is to zee zem cookink wiz joy!’
It was the smorgasbord of european dishes, from those meatballs served by a Swedish grandma and her family to the saltimbocca veal, the Norwegian cod and the infinite varieties of pasta – which gave Michelin-starred chef Giorgio Locatelli the chance to explain the difference between agnolotti and mezzelune (one is square and one is semi-circular, signora).
The Marks family from Sweden, naturally, spend their summers in Scandinavia and declared their platter of garlicky mincemeat dollops to be ‘the most traditional national dish ever’.
But their rivals, the Charleses, went one better by announcing that they didn’t even know what food was till they visited Italy. Newlywed Yorkshire lass Betty, 29, recited the ten stages of cooking the perfect risotto: they began with ‘temptation’, progressed through ‘sigh’ (which apparently means adding the booze) and ‘buttering’, and ended with ‘eating’.
Then she repeated them all, this time in Italian. Not to be outdone, judge Rosemary Shrager tasted the concoction and pronounced it ‘bellissimo’. ‘Buonissimo,’ Giorgio corrected her impatiently.
You might not learn much about cookery from this programme but, by the end of the 12 weeks, you ought to be word-perfect in at least three european languages.
The producers have clearly been racking their brains to discover just what made Bake Off such a delightful format. BBC executives are like gamblers who once rolled a triple-six and are throwing the dice again and again, trying to work out what they did right.
The Cookery Showdown, cohosted by Zoe Ball, has familiar format elements such as the three challenge rounds.
The first requires the families to rustle up a lunch-for-four, for a tenner; then we visit their homes, to see them cook a feast against the clock; finally, it’s the showstopper or, as Giorgio calls it, Imprezz Ze Neighbourz.
If this was home cooking, it qualified only on a technicality. The idea of three generations collaborating in the kitchen is a fantasy for most families, unless you count Grandad and Little Cousin Nigel reluctantly washing saucepans together on Christmas Day because the dishwasher is full.
The recipes, with their complex sauces and tempura-battered veg, were better suited to MasterChef than a traditional Sunday lunch.
Luckily, both the Marks and the Charles family were hugely likeable – and 86-year-old Toren was a star who couldn’t get enough of the camera. A former catwalk model and fashion designer, she had been married four times: three of her husbands, she said, had been very good.
What a fabulous put-down! Since she didn’t say which was the unsatisfactory man, the unspoken criticism might apply to any of them.
Toren was shy of revealing her age, because she’s currently got two boyfriends on the go, and she hasn’t told either of them that she’s an octogenarian.
One of them is 20 years her junior. That might just make her the oldest cougar in town.
All of her family was fiercely competitive, and they couldn’t even agree who had chosen their menu. Toren glared at her daughter Jessica and refused to concede more than this: ‘She may well have come up with the idea at the same time as me.’
But for all their spirit, the Marks trio were knocked out, and we won’t be seeing them again.
That’s a glaring fault in the head-to-head format, where one team progresses each week and one goes home. It’s brutal, and may have worked better with three families.
Multilingual Betty and her family went through to the semifinals… but we won’t meet them again for weeks. That stop-start pattern means the Cooking Showdown will struggle to become compulsive viewing. But it’s great to see cooking back on BBC2.