who passed on their accumulated knowledge with their egos held well in check, to the male zone, where its new luminaries are a bunch of flashy performance artists. The success of these performers is not measured by whether the woman along the road successfully cooked one of their dishes, but by their ratings and book sales.
The focus of food fashion has become more rarefied, arcane and preoccupied with the endless pursuit of novelty; in fact, it is entirely detached from most Britons’ domestic cooking experience. A lot of media attention has been given to Heston Blumenthal, chef of the Fat Duck at Bray and his particular style of cooking – ‘molecular gastronomy’. Mr Blumenthal’s gastronomy is complex, and is best contemplated only by the most seriously skilled chefs, yet his recipes turn up with regularity in programmes and magazines aimed at ordinary people, most of whom seem impressed. Writing in the Evening Standard, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown declared herself to be perplexed by the whole Blumenthal phenomenon: ‘I watched him on TV last week making mashed potatoes – twelve steps, one and a half hours, eight different pots and utensils and an end result that looked like thick soup. Is he taking the mickey?’
Food as a spectator sport has now become a huge industry in Britain. In countries that are feted for their cuisine, such as Italy and France, food has a much lower profile in the media. Weekend newspapers carry a restaurant review, perhaps a profile of a chef, a diary of local food and wine festivals, and the odd recipe. News-stands sell a number of cheap, practical magazines filled with seasonal recipes for everyday cooking. Commonly these recipes are not authored, since the object of the exercise is to show what the dishes look like and explain how to make them, not sell the lifestyle of food celebrities. When chefs appear on French and Italian television, viewers do not get a through-the-keyhole snoop into their lives to see their children, homes or long-suffering partners. They simply stand up, demonstrate a recipe and leave it at that. If you talk about ‘celebrity chefs’, Europeans look blank and are not sure what you mean.
The justification advanced for the Great British Media Food Circus with its clowns, acrobats and survival artists is that it has helped Britain catch up with established food cultures and rekindled the flame of British gastronomy. Jamie is turning on young people to cooking by making it seem trendy and youthful. Gordon is drumming up recruits for the catering profession by reducing B-list celebrities to tears in front of the camera. Paul and Brian are supplying stressed-out housewives with barnstorming 15-minute menus using hideously incompatible and unfamiliar ingredients that will invigorate their lacklustre cooking. The only problem with this noisy and ever more attention-seeking circus is that it has had the opposite effect. As the food writer Tamasin Day-Lewis has commented: ‘What strikes me is the number of perfectly competent cooks who say they have become frightened of cooking. They feel that what they once cooked with confidence is no longer fashionable. Restaurant and television food has added to their insecurity.’ A case in point is comedienne Arabella Weir, who confesses: ‘All that plethora of cookery shows really does is make me feel insecure. They don’t make me think, “Oh what a great thing to do with scallops and chives.” I just think, “Oh God! I’m just a fat oaf who lives in a horrible kitchen!’”
As far as the media is concerned, food and cooking in Britain should be viewed similarly to advertising. Its job is to sell us an aspirational lifestyle in which food occupies its time-honoured place in British society as a way of defining class, status and refinement. But, like parading a line of skinny supermodels before a local Weightwatchers group, its effect is not empowering but paralysing. The people who are apparently showing us how to cook are asking too much of us. They offer a menu of incessant choice, seasoned with a perpetual stream of possibility. But they are not like us, they do not represent us, and we can never be like them. They live in a world glossy with food fashion, rich with knowledge and busy with perpetual novelty. We watch them, talk about them, and let ourselves be entertained by their antics as a form of diversion and escapism, but we know that all this has little or nothing to do with real life.
Just days before the 2005 G8 Summit meeting at Gleneagles in Scotland, French President Jacques Chirac put his diplomatic foot in it. At a high-level meeting in Russia to celebrate the 750th anniversary of the founding of Kaliningrad, and in earshot of reporters from the French daily newspaper, Libération, President Chirac entertained the Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder by mocking British food. ‘We can’t trust people who have such bad food,’ he was quoted as saying, compounding the insult with, ‘the only thing they [the British] have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow.’ President Putin and Chancellor Schroeder seemed to appreciate his humour, laughing and joining in with the banter.
Britain, on the other hand, was not at all amused. Rather than brushing it off as might a country confident about its food culture, and cuisine, the UK rose to the bait – big time. ‘Don’t talk crepe, Jacques!’ bellowed the Sun. ‘How would Mr Chirac feel if others descended to this level of argument and called him a snob and a has-been who pongs of garlic?’ asked the Daily Telegraph. Egon Ronay, publisher of the eponymous restaurant guide, accused the French President of being ill-informed. ‘A man full of bile is not fit to pronounce on food. There’s no other country in the world whose food has improved so greatly and more quickly in the last 15–20 years than this country,’ he said. In the Evening Standard, Fay Maschler, doyenne of British restaurant critics, denounced President Chirac’s ‘ignorant, witless remarks’, retaliating with a tirade against French food:
‘The simple little restaurant run by maman and papa straight off the pages of Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking, where a carefully composed meal made from local produce was sold for a song, exists no more. Or at least it needs a Sherlock Holmes detective to find. Menus in various departments of France are repetitive and monotonous … Restauration in its homeland (France) has become a depressed and cynical exercise … Even getting a good cup of coffee and a noble loaf of bread is nowadays easier in London than in Paris.’
The rivalry between the French and the British is historic. France and Britain have been best of enemies for centuries. Cross-Channel insults are nothing new, and the French President’s remarks were bound to provoke a certain amount of retaliatory flag-waving and chauvinism. Back in 1999, a light-hearted article published in the New York Times in which the critic William Grimes said that Cornwall ‘probably offers more bad food per square mile than anywhere else in the civilized world’ and likened the Cornish pasty to a doorstop, actually provoked one pasty maker into burning an American flag in protest.
But the strength and stridency of the reaction to President Chirac’s comments demonstrated that he had wounded our national pride in a fundamental way. But why such vulnerability? The French President had exposed our long-standing Achilles heel. However much commentators try to promote a rehabilitated image of British food with inspiring tales of booming farmers’ markets, new-wave artisan producers and innovative restaurants, the unpalatable fact is that other nationalities either just don’t buy it or, at best, they judge any improvement to be minimal. For instance, in 2001 the New Yorker magazine talked of ‘the baby steps the British are taking away from their tradition of gruesomely bad cooking’.
The United States enjoys being rude about Britain’s food. Thinking Americans feel embarrassed about their
