The New Statesman's food writer Bee Wilsonrashly gave in to the madness of Masterchef. Now she will never contemplate a shredded leek again
Revenge is a dish often served cold - much like the food on Masterchef, which has ever so slightly congealed by the time the judges get to taste it. Last Sunday afternoon, I was roundly defeated in the semi-finals of this ten-year-old BBC institution. You may have missed it. You may have better things to do than watch amateur cooks in bright kitchens abusing baby vegetables.
Unfortunately, millions did see it. It wasn't a performance that did credit to the New Statesman. I ruined my pastry, overcooked some rice, made a feeble sauce and messed around with a piece of tuna. The only good thing about my food was that it was said to resemble Janet Street-Porter's wardrobe (by the woman herself). And, on reflection, I'm not sure that is a good thing. Before I'm sacked as food writer, here are a few thoughts on the curious process that began over a year ago and from which I have only just been liberated .
Back in 1997, I was a Masterchef viewer. I watched as nice Julie Friend from St John's Wood was crowned champion for her brilliant mushroom risotto and delectable short-bread. At this time, I was a newly-wed with a new kitchen. And I wondered in a half-hearted way whether I, too, might not join Loyd Grossman on the "big breadboard" of the Masterchef set.
I should make it clear from the start that there are no Vanessa-style con-tricks to expose behind the scenes of Masterchef. Everything is by the book and then some. Union Pictures, which makes the programme for the BBC, takes the title of "British Amateur Chef Grand Prize" seriously and puts contestants through a rigorous selection process. The first stage was filling in an application form for an application form. Then came the application form proper, which demanded paragraphs on my philosophy of food, the best uses of tapenade and a proposed menu. Hundreds apply and are rejected at this stage in each of the nine regions. (What do they do wrong? Want their tapenade smeared on gingerbread?)
A handful are invited to non-televised cook-offs. Mine took place at Norwich Catering College, and offered the first taste of the Masterchef experience: the packing of ingredients at dawn, the fraught car journey, the tense two-and-a-half hours of cooking, the knuckle-biting judgement. Some people enter and fail year after year, which gives the proceedings a faintly desperate edge. I tried to make polite conversation with one woman about her rhubarb sorbet. She met me with steely-faced, Stalinist silence, as if I'd asked her to reveal state secrets. All around the room, baroque things had been done with spun sugar and tuile baskets. My misshapen mango gratins seemed very homely by comparison. Yet to my amazement, I won through to compete on TV. It momentarily seemed like the most exciting thing ever to have happened to me.
That was before they started asking me about hobbies. The ideal Masterchef contestant not only cooks but is an origami-folding, bungee-jumping, caravanning, bird-watching oenologist - the bathetic modern version of a renaissance man. Everyone has a short biographical film made, to display "personality". When I protested that my greatest interests were reading, watching films and . . . er . . . cooking, they weren't having any of it. A researcher visited me at home to "delve into my psyche". In the end, they filmed me riding a bicycle and having a real-live Cambridge "supervision". This took a whole morning.
Meanwhile, I had to compose and submit recipes and "timings" to account for every five minutes of the filming. Touched by the Masterchef madness, I found myself toying with quenelles and muslin-strained reductions (though I am glad to say I never acquired a blowtorch). My nights were spent dreaming of menus, my days in arduous shopping trips and expensive experiments with organic meat. The waste involved was shocking.
Finally, the great day came. At the Maidstone studios, on a hot July day, everything went right. I was given the calming blue kitchen. My tortellini didn't burst. The celebrity was Marianne Jean-Baptiste. The chef, Eugene McCoy, was unshowy and sympathetic. The other contestants were convivial. Then the judges "deliberated, cogitated and digested" and, again much to my surprise, I won.
It was too good to last. When I returned for the semi-final a week later, everything was different. The whole of Masterchef is filmed in an intensive fortnight and by week two everyone looked nauseated. The camera crew, who a week ago had guzzled up the leftovers like vultures, now stared palely at the disgusting heaps of prawns and kiwi soup. Loyd was green around the gills, for all the expert ministration of the make-up woman. My own appetite was shot to pieces and I'd lost my sense of taste. Suddenly, all the cliched horrors of TV cookery began to come true.
My pastry melted under the studio lights. In search of a better angle, a production assistant ruined a pile of coriander leaves I had carefully separated by dumping a heavy dish on top of them. My pretentious, over-constructed menu fell apart, as did my walnut crostini.
Alastair Little, the chef, wandered around the studio with the air of a disappointed man. Not as famous as he once was, no longer even as famous as those chefs who used to be much less famous than him, he mugged for the cameras and took over the peeling of my tomatoes. As for the other judge, Janet Street-Porter, she was an hour late. When she did arrive, she was monstrously rude about the food, in violation of all the nice middle-class etiquette of the show. She said the winning pudding, made by Larry McGarry, resembled a bucket of slurry. (Unsurprisingly, this remark did not garnish the final edit of the programme.) McGarry, an advertising man from Belfast, was not best pleased, continuing to mutter viciously even after his victory. I look forward to his performance in the final, to be screened on 28 March.
"That was farcical," admitted the ever amiable Grossman at the end. Then he told me a story about the Third Way guru Anthony Giddens. Apparently Loyd was on the panel which selected this "great man" as director of the LSE. What really impressed him, he said, was that Giddens walked into the interview carrying a packet of Bath Oliver biscuits, in reference to a recent gossip column story about him. It was a peculiar insight into Blair's Britain. I think this was Loyd's idea of consolation for my failure.
I went away baffled but unconsoled. My stomach traumatised, I threw up out of the car window on the way home. Eventually, I was able to enjoy cooking once more, though never again the tower-of-shredded-leeks-and-monkfish variety.
In a bizarre postscript, a girl from Masterchef called me up while I was writing this article. The Masterchef winner of 1993 is looking for someone to cook in his villa in Cyprus for five weeks. It would be hard work and not very well paid. Would I be interested? I didn't know whether to be flattered or insulted. Mostly, I just feel sick.
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