Recipes give us food for thought
TOM RHODES, the new Masterchef champion, finally had his moment when the programme, delayed because of the Duke of Edinburgh’s death, was shown a week later. The BBC’S coverage of Prince Philip’s death had become the most complained-about moment in TV history.
“So Grandpa,” a child will ask in years to come, “do you remember what you were doing on the day Prince Philip died?”
“Yes, I was complaining in the strongest terms to the BBC about not being able to see Greggwallace eat pudding.”
I was pleased Tom won. He was nice and modest and didn’t bore on about an Italian granny like the other bloke. Unlike most winners who always aspire to open a restaurant he said he was interested in writing books (he has 300 cookery books of his own) and teaching. Maybe talk of opening restaurants seems a bit overambitious when we’re still not allowed to eat indoors.
Meanwhile Ed Balls, the ex- politician, Mr Yvette
Cooper and amiable Strictly star, has framed his forthcoming autobiography as a sort of cook book called Appetite, “a memoir in recipes”. Which sounds rather more appealing that most politicians’ memoirs.
I’ve also been putting my recipes in some sort of order – one of the more pleasant lockdown activities and a real trip down memory lane. There were hundreds of scraps of paper and clippings from close on 40 years stuffed into a folder.
Reading what was on the other side of the recipe brought back long-forgotten political stories and things we once cared about such as the Exchange Rate Mechanism and Bananarama.
Some were in my late mother’s handwriting (her fruit cake) which gave me a pang and some had been used as notes such as “Can you get the cats in?” scrawled on a recipe for a gooseberry fool. Some, stained and mottled, had been typed out on a manual typewriter and looked very quaint.
Some recipes had never been attempted and never would be. Why did I ever think I was going to cook wood pigeon? Straight in the bin. My first attempt – years before – at filing recipes was in alphabetical order like an address book. But that hadn’t worked because unless you are desperate to find a thousand ways with chicken thighs under “C”, you never look at the recipes properly. The real pleasure lies in flipping through a random patchwork of goodies and finding one that hits the spot.
Like most haphazard cooks many of the recipes I use now are ones I look up online. As a result (and because my printer hardly ever works) I have to find them on my phone or laptop each time I make them.
Like love letters, recipes could end up being another victim of the online world. Shame.
JONATHAN Van-tam, England’s deputy chief medical officer is fond of a football analogy. His dispatches from the Downing Street doom room are peppered with talk of penalties and equalisers. So I was looking forward to him casting the European Super League as a deadly new variant which couldn’t be relegated. Or something. But then, poof! it disappeared overnight. Like a pantomime villain. If only the variants would do the same.