Masterchef? No, I’m Disaster Chef

A warning from ESTHER RANTZEN. Don’t come to supper unless you like ‘chip-shop chicken’ casserole and coffee mousse as chewy as a car tyre

FOR decades it was a closely guarded secret, one I only shared with my closest friends and family. Then, last week, I was horrified to discover that I’d been outed in a gossip column. A former colleague revealed that when I hosted a That’s Life! reunion, all the guests had to bring their own food. Not because it was a ‘pot luck’ dinner, where everyone brings a dish, nor because I’d had a domestic emergency that meant I couldn’t bake, but because I am a truly terrible cook.

You can imagine my humiliation. After all, for years I have gone to great lengths to hide my kitchen catastrophes.

Many times I’ve been invited to take part in Come Dine With Me, but have always refused because I didn’t want to admit that my favourite recipe is ‘pierce film and wait for ping’.

If I invite any of my children to have a cosy supper with me, they only accept on condition it’s a takeaway.

While I’m consoled that Victoria Beckham has now admitted she, too, is hopeless in the kitchen (despite cookery lessons from none other than Gordon Ramsay), it’s certainly never been more embarrassing to admit your culinary career peaked when you learned to boil an egg.

We live in an age when TV listings are stuffed with people pan- frying and marinading, kneading and poaching, julienning and fileting.

Celebrities cook. Nonentities cook. Hairy bikers and elegant old ladies cook. How could I possibly confess that I cannot cook? That rather than MasterChef, I am Disaster Chef.

And now the Great British Bake Off hype is back — the new series only begins tonight but shops are apparently already running low on mixing bowls and rolling pins — I am seriously considering emigration.

Britain was so different when I was young. We Brits used to take pride in our Spartan approach to food. How well I remember wartime meal ordeals, like eggpowder omelettes and spam rissoles.

After World War II, British food became famous around the world for over-cooked vegetables floating in water, black pudding and suet roly-poly.

At school, I was taught how to cook ‘white stew’ made out of something called ‘scrag end’ (I can’t imagine which bit of the body it was, and what animal it could ever have belonged to) and ‘apple dumplings’, which were far more dumpling than apple.

I have never attempted either since. In fact, cookery lessons put me off the whole process for life.

My late mother did her best to reverse the damage. She was what used to be called ‘a plain cook’ — which meant no frills. In her case, it meant no flavour either.

Although I do remember that her roast potatoes had a unique taste of laundry. I never knew why, until my sister told me she’d peel them days in advance, and keep them in a saucepan of cold water until needed. But I think it was the same saucepan she boiled our face-flannels in once a month to clean them.

The one dish she excelled at was rice pudding, with delicious brown skin. But after eating rice puddings for ten years, out of sheer boredom I decided to try something new.

I found a recipe for coffee mousse, persuaded Mum to let me try it out at a family party, and arranged it prettily in little glass dishes.

Unfortunately, after a couple of hours in the fridge the strong coffee rose to the top, and the gelatine sank to the bottom. Mum supplied

The meat was so tough that guests hid it in napkins

straws so that the guests could suck up the liquid, though nobody could chew through the gelatinous layer of rubber underneath.

A recipe by Robert Carrier — the celebrity chef of the Sixties — for chicken stuffed with cucumber that I made for another party took hours to create and ended up soggy and tasteless. A rich chocolate cake I attempted refused to solidify, no matter how long I left it in the oven, so in the end I poured it into a frying pan and fried it.

Things didn’t improve when I left home and moved into a flat and became my own hostess. You might think a casserole would be foolproof. Not in my hands.

On the one occasion I attempted to make one from scratch, the meat turned into tough little squares of leather and, as I discovered later, guests hid them in their napkins.

When my TV consumer programme That’s Life! began, I invited one of our presenters, Michael Groth, home to discuss a difficult investigation. I bought a quiche for supper. Surely nothing could go wrong?

But I’d failed to read the label and notice that it was frozen. So I served it, still in that state, to poor Grothy, who never forgot it, and used to tell the story whenever I invited any of the team home.

I did perfect one dish, though. My last- minute instant chicken casserole. Here’s the recipe. First, find a chippy, and buy some cooked chicken pieces, one per guest and one extra in case of accident. Next, buy several cans of vegetable soup and some chunky bread. Put the chicken in a large saucepan, heat the soup, and pour over. Serve with the bread and plenty of red wine to distract your guests from the taste.

Thankfully, when I became a working mother I had a series of excellent housekeepers who made nutritious meals for us. But, despite my previous disasters, I still had ambitions in the kitchen. When I interviewed chef Raymond Blanc, I asked him the secret to being a wonderful cook, and he told me cooking food is putting love on a plate.

Perhaps that’s why one year I decided to make Christmas lunch for the family. To begin with I felt nothing but pride. The turkey was fine and the Brussels sprouts edible.

But then came pudding time. My late husband, Desmond, poured brandy over the traditional Christmas pud and set fire to it with satisfying dramatic effect.

As the flames died down I spooned brandy cream over every portion, not noticing until we started eating that I’d used the wrong condiment, and so I had covered every steaming, fragrant lump of pudding — the same pudding I had slaved hours over to create — with mayonnaise.

Only my gallantly loyal mother managed to eat it, and declare it was delicious. But then, she was used to my cooking.

Most recently I invited Professor Tanya Byron, the respected child psychologist, to lunch to talk about ChildLine’s work. Somehow I managed to overcook the salmon, so it was brown and hard, but at the same time undercook the new potatoes, so they were like bullets.

I apologised, and she was kind. As a psychologist, I hope she didn’t delve into my motivation and think that I was trying to poison her.

As my poor family have often said (in the style of MasterChef judges): ‘Cooking does not taste tougher than this.’ So I have now imposed upon myself a cardinal rule of entertaining: never cook, only assemble.

In other words, buy prepared ingredients and put them together.

The obvious example is salad. I love salads, not least because they’re raw and so can’t be undercooked or cooked to death.

Tear up a few lettuce leaves (or buy them ready-prepared in a bag),

I covered the Christmas pud with mayonnaise

add chopped spring onions, tomatoes and cucumber.

Serve alongside barbecued chicken, (ready cooked by a supermarket), sliced ham, pre- cooked quails’ eggs, a jar of mayonnaise and a little bottle of classic French dressing and it makes a very respectable lunch. For dessert, it’s ripe camembert and biscuits, or my patent black-and-white pudding.

For the sake of other non-cooks, I will share that pudding recipe — my own invention. Take one carton of really classy shop-bought vanilla ice-cream. Buy several punnets of blackberries and a bottle of creme de cassis blackcurrant liqueur.

Put several spoonfuls of ice cream in individual glass dishes, then sprinkle with blackberries (or, as Nigella would say, ‘tumble’ in the blackberries). Finally, pour the creme de cassis over everything.

But I am aware salad and ice cream won’t do for every occasion, and I do love dinner with friends. So about 15 years ago, I created a small local dining club, consisting of friends, acquaintances and likeminded locals.

One Monday evening a month, we’ll meet at a local restaurant for dinner, splitting the bill equally.

It’s the perfect solution for cooks as hopeless as me: there’s no menu to devise or hours spent laying the table beforehand and washing up afterwards. It’s not nearly as expensive as a caterer, you don’t need to know exact numbers, and single women are welcome.

And most importantly for me, I don’t have to go through the torture of eating stuff I’ve cooked.

In retrospect, it’s what I should have done for the now-infamous That’s Life! reunion.

So will I be watching Mary Berry, Paul Hollywood and their baker’s dozen of eager would-be pastry chefs over the forthcoming weeks?

No. My thoughts go out to all the hopeless non- cooks, who like me will spend Tuesday nights hiding behind our sofas shouting ‘Great British Bake Off, back off!’