Gosh, they’re scrumptious. But I really can’t stomach the smug clean eating brigade
QUENTIN LETTS serves up another spicy helping from his new book
FROM the great and good to self-interested celebrities, Quentin Letts’ new book takes aim at Those Who Know Best. In today’s extract, he takes a bite out of the TV cooks who just love telling us what to eat.
YoUr starter for ten: What is umeboshi dressing? Is tamarind a lizard, a bulbous stringed instrument or a leguminous tree whose fruit is used in Worcester sauce? Is tabbouleh a meditative copulation technique, a salty Levantine dip or the transsexual heroine of an H. rider Haggard novel?
Is courgetti an 85cc moped in Sardinia, fine noodles made by pushing baby marrows through a mincer, or Middlesbrough’s goalkeeper in the 2008/9 season?
The answer is that each is a food. Not that Mrs Beeton would have known. Nor would Sixties TV chef Fanny Cradock.
Cooking advice used to be about taking everyday ingredients and making something palatable. Today, it is about showing how sophisticated you are and what obscure commodities you can ‘source’. You then turn those foreign objects into something that may well be repulsive.
Is the intention to give friendly advice to amateur chefs, or is it about swanking and making us feel small?
Umeboshi dressing is recommended by the Hemsley sisters, Jasmine and Melissa, thirty-something South London beauties much promoted by Channel 4 as ‘passionate foodies’. Neither looks a convincing trencherwoman. Some of their critics become indignant that they do not have qualifications in nutrition. That worries me less than the fact that they are so skinny. Have these girls never had a real pig-out?
FOR the Hemsleys’ roasted carrot and fennel salad, you need quinoa, fennel, carrots, sesame seeds (black and white), asparagus, pink radishes, spring onions, coconut oil, fresh mint and coriander, umeboshi puree, sesame oil, fresh ginger, tamari, raw honey, fresh chilli and, phew, water.
The entire dish not only sounds horrible, but also tricky to whip up on the spur of the moment. How many of us have quinoa, raw honey and umeboshi puree on our larder shelves?
Through their cookbook, the Hemsleys preach ‘clean living’ and promote a philosophy based on ‘15 pillars’ that will help their disciples to achieve a state of ‘wellness’.
What this means is making chocolate brownies from black beans rather than wicked flour and whisking up a quick beetroot and cinnamon smoothie. (Don’t forget the raw cacao nibs, the desiccated coconut — and a sick bag for the moment after tasting it.)
The message here is not so much about healthy living as expensive living, while posing with a superior ‘I know what spirulina powder is’ expression on your vegan chops.
The Hemsleys have a deadly rival on the clean-living front: Ella Mills (nee Woodward), a young honey from an immensely rich background and blessed with good media contacts. Her mother is a Sainsbury and her father a former New Labour Cabinet minister.
Ah, Ella, so fey, so pure, so fond of avocado that she even uses it to make cheesecake. My wife and I tried it once. It nearly made me boke on my plate.
Ella looks and sounds a sweetenough girl, but her proselytising feels horribly cliquey. Does she look so gorgeous simply because she is a trust-fund millennial who makes her own almond milk (the better to go with her date and chia pudding, to be eaten en route to ‘work, gym, school’)? or does she look diaphanously pretty because she has enviable genes and her parents were loaded?
There is nothing new about melding philosophy with cookery. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1859) opens with a quotation from the Book of Proverbs — ‘she looketh well to the ways of her household and eateth not the bread of idleness’.
Yet the tone of Mrs Beeton’s book differs from that of the Hemsley sisters and Ella Mills.
She is bracingly utilitarian, addressing the reader as a comrade in the trenches rather than handing down (as if from some scented, Zenned-out cloud) advice on how to be as beautiful and d successful as lovely, lovely us.
Mrs Beeton barks out her recipes for cheap onion soup or roast widgeon, or gives brisk instructions on how to dress a plover or ptarmigan. She does not pass
comment on good and bad enzymes or the cleansing of your kidneys or breaking down your cellulite.
Can cooking really be about selfdenial? Keith Floyd, Nineties TV chef, never thought so. You could argue that heavy- drinking, fag-puffing, debt-ridden, wifehopping Floyd was no ‘ role model’. Sod role models.
Floyd may have been a toper, but was there not something uplifting about him?
He took cooking outside, bunged in flavours with abandon and glugged away in front of the camera. Sometimes he omitted important ingredients.
For all these so- called faults, he spread fun and encouraged us to try the new. Above all, he did so without making himself sound superior and us small.
ADAPTED from Patronising Bastards: How The Elites Betrayed Britain, by Quentin Letts, published by Constable on October 12 at £16.99. © Quentin Letts 2017. To order a copy for £13.59 (offer valid until October 14, 2017), visit mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640. P&P is free on orders over £15.