Finally, a TV chef who cooks real food, not edible coral reef...

and it’s a woman, of course, not a ranting alpha male   

By Suzanne Moore

 

Watching Lorraine Pascale making some focaccia on telly the other night was a blessed relief.

The ex-model is quite gorgeous, of course, but what I liked was her calmness and the fact that this was something I might possibly make.

She wasn’t shouting at me about her testicles.

Or telling me the planet would end if I don’t eat fish, or insisting I rear and kill my own pigs.

Pascale is a sure sign that the cult of the celebrity chef is so tired that they couldn’t even get a souffle to rise if its main ingredient was Viagra.

The superchefs seem to be imploding, flogging themselves to supermarkets after having told us supermarkets are evil. Like rock stars who are no longer hip, they have to find political causes to give them a purpose in life.

Still we binge on cookery programmes and ever more complicated recipes while eating microwaved mush.

We are continually lectured about organic produce while doctors are making a small fortune with drastic gastric bypasses so we bypass the organ of the stomach altogether.

One by-product of the recession could be a vaguely more sensible attitude to food, but I have yet to see that happen.

Heston Blumenthal – someone who freely admits that he would rather study food than make it – has just opened a new restaurant called Dinner.

It is already solidly booked for the next three months.

I freely admit I don’t get his approach to cooking, which may make me a philistine.

Though I like conceptual art and mad professors, I do not understand the point of making food that simply references other food or other experiences.

I sat aghast at the edible coral reef he made recently.

I mean, why?

But the semi-celebs he gave it to liked it.

Perhaps it was because he had given them a hit of laughing gas (nitrous oxide) first.

That’s a good idea for my next dinner party: get guests around.

Drug them. Give them pretend starfish.

Then there’s Jamie who, having done his best to improve school dinners, is now finding it hard in America because the kind of food he wants to cook is considered too expensive.

Gordon Ramsay is caught up in a rampage of Botox and over-exposure, while even Marco Pierre-White is flogging stock cubes.

These guys aren’t actually cooking any more.

The gentler Michel Roux is to be found training up some feisty young people to provide Michelin-star service.

But the very notion of this service seems deeply dated.

Do diners want waiters constantly hovering over them telling them what they are eating?

Trust me, I was once a waitress and the last thing you would ever want is me crashing around your table.

All of this frenzy seems to mask an underlying anxiety.

Cooking, as we know in the real world, is mostly done by women but at this elevated level it is done by men.

So, to compensate, some kind of hyper-masculinity, control-freakery and insane competition takes over.

Most female cooks would not venture to Vietnam to eat the still-beating heart of a snake, as Anthony Bourdain did, or spend hours in a lab trying to recreate the taste of a Pot Noodle, as Blumenthal does.

Those who think Blumenthal is a genius cite his new dish Meat Fruit as a sign of it.

God, has that man ever fed a child?

 Meat Fruit sounds to me like a category mistake that someone with a disorder might make.

 But then I am someone who, when given foam in a restaurant, upset my companion by asking what the scum was.

Anyway, I am off to recreate the childhood memory of fish fingers, mash and beans – in my own unique way, by using actual fish fingers, mash and beans!

It’s a radical concept, I know. Surely I will be offered my own TV series soon.