Food
"I'm a crazy maniac, I like to challenge myself, we're going to have a right old laugh." Who could be speaking? It must be a chef. In fin-de-millenaire Britain only the celebrity chef possesses that peculiar combination of inane humour, cod competitiveness, tautology and desperate ambition masked by oops-there-goes-my-souffle self-deprecation. Oh, and a weird detachment from the food that is their trade.
The chef in question was Steven Saunders, an old hand of Ready Steady Cook, Here's One I Made Earlier and others. He was bouncing around in a pair of wasabi-green trousers adorned with sherbert-coloured oranges and lemons, wielding a blender and a vanilla pod and giggling like "a crazy maniac" at my local shopping mall, the Grafton Centre, Cambridge. The occasion was a week of celebrity cook-offs - "Cooking up a Storm" - run by Heffers bookshop. Events took place in an overlit circle between La Senza lingerie and the Virgin record store. The audiences were just what you'd expect: children on school holidays, young mums with pushchairs, old ladies carrying bags of Thornton's chocolates. No obvious gastronomes . . .
The lunchtime meal was cooked by "The Nosh Brothers", Nick and Mick. "Never heard of them," muttered a codger at the back. Nor had I. It turns out the freres Nosh are middle-aged bon viveurs, more Robert Carrier than Ainsley Harriott. And, oh, the tips they gave us! Always grind your pepper clockwise. Add vanilla extract to mashed potato for something special. Shave your parmesan with a potato peeler. Don't spill fish sauce, because you'll never get the smell out. The audience gasped, though whether in boredom or fascination I cannot say. The little boy next to me wanted to know if he'd appear on TV.
Everyone perked up once Saunders rolled in, with a local DJ for company, and gave us what everyone had come for - a Punch and Judy show. He modelled sushi rolls, filled with carrots simmered in sake ("delish"), then a mousseline of sole and salmon with vanilla veloute sauce ("yummy scrummy") and a passion-fruit souffle. There was much joshing about whether the egg whites were peaking. And to show how clever he was, he made a vegetable lattice, to oohs and aahs, and crocheted courgettes to balance on his tower of nonsense.
For someone interested in actually eating, however, it was dispiriting. First, you couldn't taste the food (for insurance reasons). Second, you couldn't smell it (the air-conditioning had sucked all the winey, vanilla-y aromas away). Third, you couldn't cook it, without feeling like an idiot. The only remaining function of the food was its entertainment and "lifestyle" qualities. "Us chefs are getting worried," Saunders told us. "Coriander has been the herb of the 1990s - but what will be the herb of the year 2000?" Like Tony Blair, he seems to believe that if you repeat the word "modern" often enough, it acquires magical properties. His next book, fittingly, is Feng Shui Food.
The real climax of the meal was not the passion-fruit souffle but the autograph signing. A ragged queue snaked round to get posed photographs of the great man. He signed up a storm, lecturing pensioners about the "healthy, hip, modern" qualities of sushi rice. He even did one for my three-month-old baby. Have we all gone crazy mad?
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