Simon Munnery
Cook
- Posted by Simon Munnery
- 17 September 2007
The whole phenomenon of television cookery is a little baffling; the one thing that isn’t transmitted by TV is taste
Too many cooks spoil the broth; unless it is cook broth.
Poor Gordon Ramsay: His super enlarged face looms from billboards all over town. His image dwarfs him - anyone meeting him from now on cannot help but be subconsciously disappointed that his head isn’t six feet wide. "He seems so small in real life", they’ll say.
Before the billboards impinged upon my eyes I’d only been dimly aware of Gordon Ramsay. He is a celebrity TV chef I believe, famous for swearing. A swearing cook; whatever next? The spitting cook? The shitting cook? Who’d want a meal that required swearing in it’s preparation? I’d like some love in my dinner not fuck.
The whole phenomenon of television cookery is a little baffling; the one thing that isn’t transmitted by TV is taste. A celebrity TV juggler would make sense; you could enjoy the juggling via TV almost as much as you would live - but food?
This is the era of televised cookery, glossy cookbooks - and endless ready meals. In a sense the TV chefs cook so we don’t have to.
I suggest a cookery show called “Unfamiliar Kitchen” in which contestants have a very short time to prepare a meal despite not knowing the whereabouts of any utensils or ingredients and being constantly pestered by the host : "Well what are you going to cook? When will it be ready?" etcetera.
Chefs always use 'the finest ingredients'. Isn’t that cheating? Shouldn’t a great chef be able to create a decent meal out of mediocre ingredients? Where do chefs get off anyway taking the credit for food; they didn’t make it after all - they only heated it up, chopped it and slapped it on a plate. Food behaves according to the simple equation I have devised below:
Food + Food = Food
What a chef creates on a plate is a collage, not art. Then again, writers rarely invent words, and painters seldom manufacture paint, so I’m wrong. Sorry.
The billboard adverts are for Gordon’s gin, and his name’s Gordon. How did they think that one up? Presumably it wasn’t Mr Ramsay that approached the gin makers, but the other way round. Will they pursue the idea and use other famous Gordons? Gordon Brown perhaps - show him sitting in Number 10 glugging from a bottle with the strap line "Why not? It worked for Churchill!".
What products could the other celebrity chefs entwine themselves with? Jamie Oliver could promote olive oil; Antony Worrall Thompson holidays on Merseyside; Gary Rhodes, Rhodesia; Delia Smith, ironmongery.
There are several different versions of the Gordon’s advert - the first I saw bore the strap line "the most offensive word in the English language is AVERAGE". Firstly, it isn’t. Secondly it is offensive to proclaim to the general public that the word average is offensive - the public about whom one can say with certainty it is overall average.
The next one I saw said "I choose my gin far more carefully than I choose my WORDS" which devalues the other adverts as well as itself. If you don’t choose your words with care why should we listen to you? The ad seems to imply Mr Ramsay himself has said this. I’ll wager he didn’t; in which case it is partially true in that in this case he didn’t choose his words at all. Did he choose his gin? Or did it choose him?
There’s another poster showing Marco Pierre White scowling with some sort of jelly in the foreground. The caption reads "To get to heaven you must go through hell" which is a novel revision of thousands of years of theological thought - in one sentence. Previously hell has been seen as a final destination - rot in hell we say - rather than a staging post on the way somewhere else. Presumably the advert wants to imply that to reach the heavenly jelly one must pass the hellish scowls of Monsieur White - but it doesn’t: the jelly is in the foreground so the advert actually implies that one must pass through the hell of jelly to reach the heaven of Monsieur White’s face.
I often cook myself - accidents happen when chopping onions at speed. I never use recipe books; I always cook the same thing: what’s left.
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