Mary Berry watches her language
When it comes to TV cooks’ books, Berry’s patter comes up a treat, says Eleanor Steafel
‘Nigel Slater is annoying,” reads the title to a lengthy online thread discussing the irritating traits of our nation’s best-loved cooks. “The way he talks as if everybody has these magical leftovers in their fridge. ‘Transform your unwanted bits and bobs’, he says, but his recipes have ingredients you’d have to go out to buy, specially. ANNOYING.” One cook’s bits and bobs, it seems, are another’s only-ever-at-christmas special order.
Nigella, meanwhile, is berated for every innuendo-laden phrase; and who could forget the saucy magazine cover that pictured her with salted caramel oozing down her cheeks, her face an expression of complete rapture?
Newspaper columnists have devoted many an inch over the years to picking apart the long list of things that annoy them about Jamie Oliver’s particular brand of patter. Forever peppered with four-letter words and instructions to approach a dish “proper old school styleey”, you feel as if you’re being sold a Ford Focus, rather than a recipe for rabbit ragout. “SLAM it in the pan, let it do its thing, and BISH BASH BOSH, this dish means business.” Why do they always have to “mean business”? It’s a sausage, Jamie, not a heavyweight boxer.
However, Queen Mary of Berry has always represented a welcome antithesis to the frippery and frivolousness favoured by so many TV cooks. In fact, “fanciness” of any sort is verboten in Mary Berry world. During one episode of Bake Off she banned “fancy blowtorches” after several contestants used them to *gasp* finish off their meringues.
“I am not too happy that they are nearly all using a blowtorch,” she muttered to Paul through pursed lips, “to me, meringue topping is best put in the oven to get a crunchiness.”
So it is unsurprising, then, that the 83-year-old favours a fuss-free approach, both to her recipes – “simplicity is the key”, she says in Classic Mary Berry, one of her 70 books – and to writing them up.
The cookery doyenne told this month’s BBC Good Food magazine: “My best advice was given to me by my boss at the time, Olwen Frances. I was asked to do some writing for a magazine and I said, ‘I can cook, but I didn’t pass English in School Cert’. And she told me, ‘Write as you talk’. So I leave out all the fancy words in my recipes.”
Hail Mary: here’s some other cookbook lingo we could all do without…