I'm not really one for cookery programmes on the telly. You might see the odd thing you'd like to try, but I tend to get bored watching other people cooking a succession of dishes - cookery's a hands-on activity and I'd rather be doing than watching, so a good cookery book or a recipe printed off from a web page or scribbled down on the back of an envelope is more use to me than half an hour of Masterchef. Occasionally, I might see something which might inspire me to try new things - Anjum Anand's Indian Food Made Easy, for example, but that's an honourable exception.
I'm not altogether crazy about the presenters either - I think Heston Blumenthal has a bit of entertainment value, and find his affable mad scientist approach to food refreshing, although the lack of dry ice, centrifuges and vacuum pumps in my own kitchen makes emulating his recipes rather difficult.
But most celebrity cooks either irritate or bore me, from the shouty short-tempered authoritarians to what the wonderful and sorely-missed Linda Smith once described as the "aggressive blandness" of Delia Smith. There's something in me which can't quite settle down and pay attention to Delia - I think it's the same part which starts to fidget and daydream if I find myself having to attend some sort of Church service and sit through a sermon. I must admit though, that she did have a point in her last series which was intended to help people who can't cook or think they can't find the time produce quick and easy meals.
She's right to point out that a big gulf is opening up between two food extremes. At one end of the food spectrum are the sort of people who enter Masterchef, with their complicated and elaborate creations sweated out in the heat of a high -pressure professional kitchen. At the other extreme are the people who have grown up with ready meals and takeaways and hardly know how to cook the most basic of things. I remembered being a bit taken aback to hear someone in the office, who normally lived on takeaways and food prepared by his mother, announcing proudly that for an extra-special date he'd actually cooked an entire meal himself. It became clear from subsequent comments that the "cooking" actually involved heating up the various elements of a Marks and Spencer ready meal.
I think Delia's right to fret about the shrinkage of a third middle group - those of us who can cook pretty comptently as needed, but see it as a useful life skill and relaxation, rather than some sort of competitive activity done only to impress. Looking at Masterchef and similar cookery contests, it's easy to see how they would terrify someone who's never been taught to cook. If that was your only exposure to cookery, nobody would blame you for thinking that it was a fiendishly complicated art, in which you're constantly racing against the clock and where the smallest slip can lead to disaster and humiliation.
Although she's not my cup of tea, if Delia's series adds a few more recruits to the middle group who can cook a bit and don't get too stressed about it, that's got to be a good thing. The same goes for Nigella Express, another recent series with a similar manifesto.
I wasn't recruited into the middle group by a celebrity chef. The first thing which turned me into a day-to-day cook was almost certainly having a mother who cooked most things from scratch. Although I did hardly any cooking when living at home as a child and teenager, I'm sure that just having someone around who could cook had an influence on me - I may not have paid much attention at the time, but the process wasn't completely mysterious to me. Then I went away to University. As it happened, the college canteen/refectory produced some fairly mediocre food when I first arrived, so after a week or so I decided that I needed to learn some basic cookery.
I turned to a paperback copy of Katherine Whitehorn's Cooking in a Bedsitter, a cookbook for beginners, chosen more or less at random. It turned out to be a very good choice. I can hardly remember any of the recipes now, but that wasn't the point. It was a wonderfully down-to-earth, practical guide to cooking for the complete novice. It didn't assume that you had a lot of fancy equipment to hand, maybe just a ring and a couple of pans. The message was simple and useful: this isn't rocket science and you don't need a lot of elaborate gear to get started. Just a good sharp knife, a chopping board, those couple of pans, wooden spoon, a few store cupboard basics and you're away.
I started cooking on this basis and soon found that the basic processes weren't too hard. There were a couple of self-explanatory section headings - I think they were "cooking to stay alive" and "cooking to impress". I started by cooking to stay alive, no pressure there, didn't worry too much about exact quantities or authenticity, as advised, and just got a feel for cooking. Before I knew it, cooking became second nature and has been ever since.
The big lesson is that if you relax and don't stress about it, it's probably not too hard. And ignore the prescriptions of celebrity 'experts". There were fewer TV chefs in those days, but I do remember reading some old blather from Clement Freud at the time, railing against "idiots who throw handfuls of dried oregano" into some dish or other. Whatever it was would probably have been better with fresh herbs, but if you've only got a limited supply of stuff in your store cupboard, then use your own taste and imagination to decide what will go with what, and if you think it'll taste OK, just go for it. And if it turns out to be a mistake, you can learn from it and do better next time (if you're just cooking for yourself, nobody else needs to know anyway).
Delia may be the human equivalent of beige (to steal another Linda Smith-ism, originally used about Tim Henman), but she's right about cooking for beginners - relax, cheat a bit and just get on with it - and whatever you do, don't worry that you can't do the things they do on Masterchef. The fixation on high-profile celebrity chefs really is a case of the best being the enemy of the good.
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