The best television chef ever is Adam on Northern Exposure (surely the greatest series ever made). Dirty, self-centred, arrogant, appallingly rude, yet phenomenally talented – he once turned down a job at the legendary Tour d’Argent – Adam appears periodically, often accompanied by his neurotic, hypochondriac, and equally selfish wife, Eve, cooks incredible food, and then vanishes.
Adam is the anti-foodie. His enthusiasm for cooking isn’t borne out of snobbery or a desire to demonstrate either his sophistication or moral superiority, but, rather, out of a liking for food and eating. And possibly a hatred for the people for whom he cooks.
He is a world away from the TV chef-celebrities who populate cooking-driven channels like the Food Network. Indeed, when Northern Exposure aired between 1990 and 1995, the idea that a single TV channel could be devoted entirely to food was relatively new. In the US, the Food Network launched in 1993, and the now-defunct Carlton Food Network – for which, incidentally, a young David Cameron did PR – aired for the first time three years later in the UK.
Now, food is everywhere on television, and food programmes have evolved from their most basic format – a chef cooking in a kitchen – to embrace travel and reality programmes. There’s been a lot of fuss about the launch of the most recent incarnation of the unbelievably successful MasterChef franchise in South Africa. In fact, the evolution of MasterChef says a great deal about how food on television has changed over the past few decades.
The original MasterChef series aired in the UK between 1990 and 1999 and was presented by pasta sauce entrepreneur and mid-Atlantic accent promoter, Loyd Grossman. It was all very serious and restrained and most of the contestants were terribly tense ladies from the Home Counties who replicated the nouvelle cuisine they had eaten at Le Gavroche, with varying degrees of success and anxiety.
It was revamped in 2005. With two shouty judges and considerably more socially representative participants, its popularity demonstrating the shifting significance of food within middle-class Britain. The new series’s focus on training contestants to be good, highly skilled chefs is meant to produce people who could, conceivably, run their own restaurants – which, to the credit of MasterChef, winners like Thomasina Miers and Mat Follas have done successfully.
The Australian, American, and South African versions of MasterChef have increased the emphasis on teaching would-be chefs how to work in professional kitchens. Of course, people watch these series for the same reasons that they tune into The Amazing Race, Strictly Come Dancing, and Project Runway. But MasterChef has the added appeal that it aims to teach its audience about cooking: the master classes offered by its presenters are aimed as much at those watching the series as at the contestants.
In fact, the earliest and most enduring TV cookery shows were intended primarily to educate, rather than only entertain, audiences. Dione Lucas – who claimed, incorrectly, to be the first woman graduate of the Cordon Bleu Cookery Institute in Paris – taught classical French cooking to the affluent American middle classes during the 1950s. Julia Child, an altogether warmer and more appealing presenter, did the same in her long-running series. Their aim was to teach Americans how to cook properly – and during the 1950s and 1960s, ‘proper’ food was French food.
Even Fanny Cradock, despite her increasingly ridiculous television appearances towards the end of her career, cooked a version of French cuisine which was meant to be affordable and accessible to her audience. Delia Smith’s first series, Family Fayre, in the mid-1970s was intended to teach its audience how to cook. Her success – built partly on the fact that her impeccably-tested recipes always do work – owed a great deal to her ability to teach and to de-mystify processes which may at first seem difficult and complicated.
Many of the cookery shows of the 1980s and early 1990s were made by the BBC’s Continuing Education Department: Madhur Jaffrey and Ken Hom, among others, owe their early success to the Beeb’s efforts to educate audiences. It was only with the coming of Graham Kerr – the ‘Galloping Gourmet’ – and, more successfully, Keith Floyd, that cookery programmes began to shift their emphasis from education to entertainment.
I’ve never really understood Floyd’s appeal, as Paul Levy writes:
Keith Floyd was a television cook who enjoyed and profited from a large audience despite having no outstanding talent, either as a cook or as a TV presenter, no great knowledge of his subject, or any apparent passion for anything but drink.
But he could be amusing – and more so than most of the considerably more serious presenters of food programmes in Britain. In many ways, the entertainment- and lifestyle-driven series presented by Nigella Lawson, Ainsley Harriott, Sophie Dahl and others are part of Floyd’s unwitting legacy.
I’m more interested in the way that presenters of food programmes have linked their teaching to wider, social projects. In post-revolution Cuba, cookbook writer Nitza Villapol used her long-running television series to teach Cubans a cuisine which was at once ‘authentically’ Cuban but also compatible with the country’s system of food rationing. During the Special Period, she provided recipes and advice for making limited supplies go further. She is still – regardless of her association with the period – seen as the pre-eminent expert on Cuban cooking.
In Egypt, Ghalia Mahmoud has recently emerged as a popular TV chef on the 25 January cable channel. From a working-class background, Mahmoud teaches audiences ‘traditional Egyptian food, such as mahshi (stuffed vine leaves), bisara and keshk, simple fava-bean and buttermilk-based stews.’ Not only do her recipes respect the differing dietary requirements of Egypt’s range of religious groups, but she cooks with an awareness that many members of her audience have limited resources. This is patriotic cuisine for a new Egypt: one which demonstrates how to feed a family on only 250g of meat a week.
It’s particularly telling that the TV chefs of the final years of the Mubarak regime were, as Mahmoud says, ‘bigger than movie stars and spoke English and French.’ The most popular cookery teachers on television – and this includes Ina Paarman in South Africa – have been lower- to middle-class women. It’s a common observation – even complaint – that while the majority of people who cook family meals are women, the best-known and most feted cooks are all male. This isn’t entirely true. Arguably, the most influential cooks of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – those who actually teach their audiences how to prepare food – are women.
Tangerine and Cinnamon by Sarah Duff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Feb 11
I’m not entirely sure what it says about me, but the first article I read in the Observer is always Jay Rayner’s restaurant review. (In fact, I started reading the Observer in high school because of Jay Rayner’s reviews – it came as a pleasant surprise that there was a really good newspaper organised around them.) Last week’s was on Viajante in Bethnal Green, which seems to specialise in a kind of sub-Adrià-esque complicated, miniaturised cuisine. Rayner was not impressed:
In its eagerness to be so very now and forward thinking, the food at Viajante manages at times to feel curiously dated; it recalls the first flush of Hestomania, when even he has moved on and is now cooking up big platefuls of heartiness at Dinner.
Modern techniques are great. They’re brilliant. If you want to cook my steak by banging it round the Large Hadron Collider, be my guest. Dehydrate my pig cheeks. Spherify my nuts. But only do so if the result tastes nicer. At Viajante deliciousness is too often forced to give way to cleverness.
Rayner’s point is that the modernist cooking presented by Viajante is beginning to feel old hat. Even if – as he’s admitted – restaurant critics are ‘rampant neophiliacs,’ it does seem that enthusiasm for the molecular gastronomy espoused most famously by Heston Blumenthal and Ferran Adrià has peaked. Or that, rather, it’s become so integrated into the repertoires of high-end chefs that it no longer seems to be so very experimental.
I was surprised when I first heard molecular gastronomy described as ‘modernist cuisine’ – a term now probably forever associated with Nathan Myhrvold and Chris Young’s five volume tome Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. This was published last year – long after what most people would agree to be the end of literary and cultural modernism in the 1950s and 1960s. (I wonder how we should define the cuisine of the modernist movement during the early twentieth century? I tend to think of Virginia Woolf’s descriptions of feasts in To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own.)
If anything, this should be postmodern cuisine. The purpose of molecular gastronomy is to reconsider the processes which underpin cooking: to understand them, and then reconfigure them. It’s all fairly similar to Derrida’s deconstruction – and Adrià has described his technique in precisely the same terms.
When I was in London at the end of last year, I went with a friend to the V&A’s exhibition, ‘Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970-1990’. It was a strange exhibition: in an attempt to include all that could be considered postmodern in design and architecture, it had a scattergun approach as to what it included. It felt curiously empty – but I’m not sure if that’s the fault of the curator, or of the movement itself.
One of the oddest features of the exhibition was a strange preponderance of teapots. It was a pity that this was as far as the V&A got to thinking about postmodernism and food – because nouvelle cuisine, the food of the postmodern moment, was so design heavy. Even if the point of nouvelle cuisine was to liberate high-end cuisine from the heavy, meaty, and flour-based-sauce cooking of the 1960s and 1970s, it was also characterised by incredibly careful plating and presentation. In many ways, garnishes were as important as the food itself.
There are strong links, I think, between nouvelle cuisine and molecular gastronomy. Both disregard the orthodoxy established by classic French cooking and experiment with ideas and ingredients from other culinary traditions – best exemplified by the late 90s enthusiasm for ‘fusion food’, done well by Peter Gordon, done badly by legions of others – and the techniques of cooking itself. Other than the fact that molecular gastronomy is underpinned by the work of scientists Hervé This and Nicholas Kurti, it also differs from nouvelle cuisine in its playfulness – its refusal to take itself seriously, something which places it firmly within the postmodern moment. But, as Rayner suggests, it would seem that molecular gastronomy has had its day: Adrià has transformed El Bulli into a foundation, and Blumenthal is serving hearty, historical meals at Dinner.
Two years ago I taught an introduction to historiography at Goldsmiths in London, and was struck by how dated postmodern theory felt. When I studied it a decade ago – crucially, pre-9/11 – it seemed, even then, to be an exciting and useful way of understanding the world, particularly because of its emphasis on the relationship between language and power. I didn’t – and still don’t – agree with the critiques of history offered up by Hayden White and Keith Jenkins, but they were thought-provoking.
After the events of 11 September 2011, the War on Terror, the 2008 economic crash, and the Arab Spring, postmodernism appears even more the product of its time: of the prosperous, confident 1980s and 1990s, when the end of communism seemed to signal Francis Fukuyama’s end of history. I find it easier to take seriously the postmodernism and poststructuralism of the 1970s and earlier – when philosophers, linguists, and theorists were attempting to find a new way of thinking reality – partly by emphasising the extent to which narratives and discourses are contingent and rooted in their particular contexts. Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979) is still an arrestingly original document.
This act of de-privileging dominant discourses – or indeed any discourse – has also been its undoing, as Edward Docx argues in a recent article for Prospect:
by removing all criteria, we are left with nothing but the market. The opposite of what postmodernism originally intended. … If we de-privilege all positions, we can assert no position, we cannot therefore participate in society or the collective and so, in effect, an aggressive postmodernism becomes, in the real world, indistinguishable from an odd species of inert conservatism.
So what follows postmodernism? Docx suggests that it is something he dubs ‘authenticism’. He explains:
we can detect this growing desire for authenticity all around us. We can see it in the specificity of the local food movement or the repeated use of the word ‘proper; on gastropub menus. We can hear it in the use of the word ‘legend’ as applied to anyone who has actually achieved something in the real world. … We can identify it in the way brands are trying to hold on to, or take up, an interest in ethics, or in a particular ethos. … Values are important once more…
…we can see a growing reverence and appreciation for the man or woman who can make objects well. We note a new celebration of meticulousness…. We uncover a new emphasis on design through making…. Gradually we hear more and more affirmation for those who can render expertly, the sculptor who can sculpt, the ceramist, the jeweller, even the novelist who can actually write.
It’s telling that the various manifestation of the new, global food movement – from Occupy Food to the hundreds of local campaigns for small-scale agriculture and unadulterated food – tend to refer to themselves as ‘real food’ (as opposed to Big Food – or the plastic, ‘Frankenstein’ food it produces).
This is a good way of understanding the recent trend in food – which Docx identifies – for the artisanal (whatever we may mean by that), the handmade, the local, the ‘old-fashioned’ (again, this is open to debate and redefinition), and the ethical. It says a great deal that the chef of the moment is René Redzepi, the Danish chef and owner of Noma, who sees himself as much as a cook as a food activist. This demand for ‘authentic’ food is, strange as it may seem, political: it’s a refusal to buy into the advertising and branding of the food industry, even if it’s an act that only a very small proportion of people can afford to do. But it’s a beginning, and a welcome one.
Tangerine and Cinnamon by Sarah Duff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
May 1
The only vaguely British royal-themed food I’ve eaten was sorely disappointing mock turtle soup (at an Oxford College – where else?) and coronation chicken. I wanted to write something about coronation chicken this week: it’s one of those dishes which say a great deal about a country’s attitudes towards food – and the relationship between these attitudes and national identities – as a particular moment in time.
This salad of cold chicken in a curried mayonnaise was invented by Rosemary Hume – the business partner of the more famous Constance Spry of the eponymous recipe book – to commemorate the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. (Originally it was called poulet reine Elizabeth.) Before I continue, this is the original recipe:
Coronation Chicken (serves 6-8)
2 young roasting chickens
water and a little wine to cover
carrot
a bouquet garni
salt
3-4 peppercorns
cream of curry sauce (see below)
Poach the chickens, with carrot, bouquet, salt, and peppercorns, in water and a little wine, enough barely to cover, for about 40 minutes or until tender. Allow to cool in the liquid. Joint the birds, remove the bones with care. Prepare the sauce given below. Mix the chicken and the sauce together, arrange on a dish, coat with the extra sauce.
Cream of curry sauce
1 tablespoon oil
2 oz. onion, finely chopped
1 dessertspoon curry-powder
1 good teaspoon tomato puree
1 wineglass red wine
¾ wineglass water
a bay-leaf
salt, sugar, a touch of pepper
a slice or two of lemon and a squeeze of lemon juice
1-2 tablespoons apricot puree
¾ pint mayonnaise
2-3 tablespoons lightly whipped cream
Heat the oil, add onion, cook gently 3-4 minutes, add curry-powder. Cook again 1-2 minutes. Add puree, wine, water, and bay-leaf. Bring to boil, add salt, sugar to taste, pepper, and the lemon and lemon juice. Simmer with the pan uncovered 5-10 minutes. Strain to cool. Add by degrees to the mayonnaise with the apricot puree to taste. Adjust seasoning, adding a little more lemon juice if necessary. Finish with the whipped cream. Take a small amount of sauce (enough to coat the chicken) and mix with a little extra cream and seasoning.
As any good English graduate will quote to you, the world is a text. In other words, any thing – any book, chair, poem, song, garden, hat, or film – can be read as a ‘text’: as a collection of signs, or symbols, which, according to material and historical context, will mean a variety of things. So a washing machine manufactured in the 1950s and bought by a white, middle-class family in Pinelands (a Cape Town suburb built along the lines of a ‘garden city‘) is not only a washing machine: it’s indicative of the impact of wartime innovations in technology on households; of rising post-war middle-class affluence; of the association of race and class in apartheid South Africa; of the slow move of women out of the home and into the workplace; but also of the reaction against women working and the social conservatism of the 1950s.
In this way, a recipe is a text like any other, and a particularly rich source for social, cultural, and economic history. Coronation chicken is interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s a dish designed to be eaten with one, fork-clutching hand. This is food that can be eaten in front of the television – and Elizabeth II’s coronation was a landmark in television history. Secondly, its inclusion of mayonnaise – something which still needed to be made by hand during the 1950s – nods to the massive influence of French cordon bleu cuisine on British cooking until, at least, the 1960s. Elizabeth David’s enthusiasm for the bourgeois cooking of Provence and other regions had yet to make an impact. In books like The Constance Spry Cookery Book, cordon bleu remained the standard for all forms of cooking.
And then there’s the curry powder. Although the Victorians and Edwardians embraced Anglicised versions of some Indian dishes – kedgeree and curry, most famously – it was only after independence in 1948 that Indian food became more widely available and popular in Britain. Admittedly, these Indian restaurants served a range of dishes which had been adapted to British tastes – they had thicker, richer gravies and were usually less spicy – but their growing popularity pointed to the fact that in post-austerity Britain, the population was enthusiastic to try exotic new flavours, if only in moderation (coronation chicken has only two teaspoons of curry powder). Indeed, the idea of curry powder is a foreign one: in India, any blend of spices is called garam masala and will vary from shop to shop, or household to household. What we call ‘curry powder’ is a mix of spices chosen by food companies. The curry powder which I use – Rajah (owned by Unilever) – contains, according to the box, cumin, coriander, and turmeric along with other spices.
As tastes have become more sophisticated, so have interpretations of coronation chicken. In a recent article in which she reworks the dish, Felicity Cloake makes the point that it’s been subject to a range of changes: curry powder has been replaced with freshly roasted and ground cumin and coriander (although in her recipe she keeps shop-bought curry powder for its retro quality); yogurt and chutney have taken the place of cream and of apricot and tomato puree; and fruit and nuts have made welcome appearances.
Possibly the greatest difference between coronation chicken prepared in 2011 and that which was made in 1953 is that cooks in the 1950s would have been more likely to use leftovers. The dish was designed purposefully to dress up potentially unappetising leftover food. Even if the original recipe included instructions for poaching chickens, the curried mayonnaise complements leftover roast chicken just as well. The accompaniment which Spry and Hume suggest also uses leftovers: a cold, dressed rice and cucumber salad.
When I was leafing through my mother’s elderly copy of the Constance Spry Cookery Book (1956) – it belonged originally to a great-aunt – I read the introduction for the first time, and was struck by the way in which Spry linked the purpose of the recipe book – providing home cooks with clear, well-written good, delicious recipes – with its post-war social and economic context. Listing the changes in attitude towards food and cooking since the late 1940s, she adds:
Something else is new too: the immensely better and fairer distribution of food among all grades of society. This is due to a variety of causes, not the least of which was the rationing system at which we grumbled so incessantly and to which we so thankfully said good-bye. Remembering as I do the days of immensely long, boring, wasteful dinners, remembering too the starvation which was all too often at our very doors, I cannot forbear to remind you how much respect ought to be paid to food, how carefully it should be treated, how shameful waste is.
I think that the greatest achievement of Lord Woolton’s tenure as Britain’s Minister of Food during the Second World War was the way in which he not only eked out the nation’s food supply, but that he ensured that most Britons ate well. Food rationing was introduced on 8 January 1940 and at first included only butter (4 oz per person per week), sugar (12 oz), raw bacon or ham (4 oz), cooked bacon or ham (3.5 oz), and eggs (2). Meat rationing began in March that year, and, gradually, tea, jam, and cheese were also rationed. During the war, bread, potatoes, coffee, fruit, vegetables, and fish were not rationed, although supplies of these were very limited.
Food rationing did not end with the war: it continued until 1953. Bread was rationed for the first time between 1946 and 1948, and potatoes in 1947. In the same year, the fruit and alcohol for Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten’s wedding cake was donated by Girl Guides in Australia, South Africa, and Jamaica because of the strictness of the rationing system.
A combination of increased exercise and a limited diet relatively low in saturated fat and sugar meant that the health of the British population actually improved during and after the war. In fact, many Britons ate considerably better during the war than before: improved distribution and a relatively standardised diet meant that those who had been too poor – or even too ignorant – to eat well before 1939 now received regular, healthy meals. George Orwell’s description of working-class meals in Wigan during the 1930s is particularly evocative:
The miner’s family spend only tenpence a week on green vegetables and tenpence half-penny on milk (remember that one of them is a child less than three years old), and nothing on fruit; but they spend one and nine on sugar (about eight pounds of sugar, that is) and a shilling on tea. The half-crown spent on meat might represent a small joint and the materials for a stew; probably as often as not it would represent four or five tins of bully beef. The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes – an appalling diet.
Compare this to the Woolton Pie recommended by the Ministry of Food as a nutritious and thrifty (if not necessarily tasty) way of feeding a family:
Take 1Ib each of diced potatoes, cauliflower, swedes and carrots, three or four spring onions – if possible, one teaspoonful of vegetable extract, and one tablespoonful of oatmeal. Cook all together for 10 minutes with just enough water to cover. Stir occasionally to prevent the mixture from sticking. Allow to cool; put into a pie dish, sprinkle with chopped parsley, and cover with a crust of potatoes or wheatmeal pastry. Bake in a moderate oven until the pastry is nicely brown and serve hot with brown gravy.
This wouldn’t have made a particularly delicious supper, but it was much healthier and more filling than sweet tea and white bread with margarine. Again, this recipe made the best of leftovers and scraps. There’s a famous wartime propaganda poster which exhorts Britons to not waste food: ‘Better pot-luck with Churchill today than humble pie under Hitler tomorrow’.
Given the success of rationing in Britain, it’s not really surprising that so many green groups have suggested that it serves as an excellent model for limiting carbon emissions and the use of fossil fuels. It’s even been argued that a return to a wartime diet would reduce the numbers of overweight and obese children in Britain. Although I think that these are creative and useful ideas, I’m concerned that they’re based partly on an idealised notion of life on the home front: that they don’t take into account the drudgery of cooking with such a limited range of ingredients (and how boring the food was); and the fact that many people did their utmost to get around rationing by growing their own food (good idea) and trading on the black market (not so good).
It’s particularly telling that the habits taught by rationing did not outlast the war. As Orwell made the point, low pay was only one reason why poor families in Wigan ate badly:
When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! … White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water.
I’m not sure that rationing will fundamentally alter people’s attitudes towards food and eating, but there are other lessons to be learned, and chiefly around controlling waste. In Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal (2009), Tristram Stuart makes the point that in the United States and Europe, about half of all edible, safe food is thrown away. This is done mainly by supermarkets and food manufacturers, but households contribute as well. There’s no single way of reducing food waste – changing legislation on ‘sell-by’ and ‘use-by’ dates would be a start – but one strategy would be to encourage people to think more carefully about how they buy food: teach them that ‘buy one get one free’ specials tend to encourage waste, for example, and make the point that wasted food is, essentially, wasted money.
And this isn’t a totally unrealistic goal. After all, not very long ago, British households threw away much less food: 2-3 per cent during the 1930s, and 4-6 per cent two decades later. Moreover, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea all have successful programmes which have reduced the amount of food waste. The latter two have made it illegal for food to go to landfill, and all three have educated the public about the importance not only of throwing away as little food as possible, but of composting or recycling that which absolutely has to go. South Korea transforms its food waste into pigswill (something banned in Britain after the outbreak of mad cow disease). Stuart writes:
Koreans obey the waste recycling law largely because they have resigned themselves to the reality: that sending food into landfill is against their own interests and that of the planet they live in. They know about the disease outbreak in Britain, and they know about the ban on swill-feeding – and they conclude, as a result, that Europeans are blithely continuing their reckless, self-interested exploitation of the planet in the manner that has characterised them for centuries.
You wouldn’t throw money away – so why do the same with food?
Further Reading
Texts cited here:
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Secker and Warburg, [1937] 1959).
Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume, The Constance Spry Cookery Book (London: The Cookery Book Club, 1956).
Tristram Stuart, Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal (London: Penguin, 2009).
Other sources:
Warren Belasco, Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
Gordon Conway, The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for All in the Twenty-First Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
Brian Harrison, ‘The Kitchen Revolution,’ in Consuming Passions: Food in the Age of Anxiety, eds. Sian Griffiths and Jennifer Wallace (Manchester: Mandolin, 1998), pp. 139-149.
Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America, revised ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
Michael Pollan, In Defence of Food (London: Penguin, 2008).
Tangerine and Cinnamon by Sarah Duff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Tangerine and Cinnamon 