The original criteria for my blog was to inspire would be cooks (who were living on a modern diet of low end, high volume, commercially produced food) to get acquainted with quality ingredients and to deal with the daily dilemmas of producing nutritious, economic meals for their families.
Consequently it was a blow to read Rose Prince's article in the Daily Mail where she says, having published a book based on quality ingredients, nourishing meals and using up leftovers, she was told by the BBC (with regards to making a TV series) that she was too ordinary! A senior commissioning editor told Rose: 'To be honest, women chefs need to be young or have model looks. Otherwise there needs to be novelty value, Two Fat Ladies or Mary Berry. A middle aged, middle classed housewife trying to solve her cooking problems and keep to a budget is not what we look for any more.'
How ironic! In the early days of TV cookery the genre was educational, cooking was seen as a necessity and cooks such as Delia Smith and Fanny Cradock were not on TV to offer visual consumption, but to actually teach us how to cook.
The office for national statistics shows TV viewing to be our number one leisure activity - cooking isn't even in the top ten! Yet a weeks audit of TV cookery comes in at 434.5 hours. As Prince says: 'We eat ready-meals while watching sumptuous feasts prepared on television. The content of many of these shows is leagues away from what might be deemed useful to viewers. Often the ingredients used in recipes are either unobtainable to ordinary people, impractical or unaffordable.'
We are no longer a nation of cooks. That cooking is now regarded as a leisure activity rather than a necessary skill says it all! Models (Lorraine Pascale) celebrities (Celebrity Masterchef) comedians (Jo Brand hosts British Bake Off: An Extra Slice) amateurs (Come Dine With Me) and celebrity chefs, (who try to outdo one another while we sit watching with our microwaved lasagne) fill 18 days' worth of food TV in a week yet we can't embrace a passionate food writer and campaigner because she is too 'ordinary.'
As I've written several times before, many celebrity cookbooks and TV cookery shows are 'staged'. I'm currently hooked on Jamie's comfort food yet finding it hard to emulate his dishes with such ease and perfection?
It's interesting isn't it that when each week on The Great British Bake Off contestants faced with the technical challenge, (this involves cooking from a recipe with basic instructions and no photos) all produce very varied results. The interpretation of the recipe invariably different from one contestant to another. Thus proving that even seasoned cooks sometimes find it hard to navigate a recipe if it's too complicated.
And so we opt for the easy choice, 'gastro pub' ready meals are proving popular, beef Wellington or venison in red wine and port sauce, not something we particularly want to cook from scratch, or something our mothers would have served, but hey we're visually addicted to gourmet food and we can buy it in a foil container, bung it in the oven and fool ourselves we're eating like Gordon Ramsey or Marco Pierre White!
Once upon a time 'food' was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible food like substances in our supermarkets, hence in our diets. We no longer worry about where nature and culture intersect, on our plates, farms, gardens and built environment. We are no longer eating what our grandparents taught us to eat!
The health industry and corporate food chains are big business. Medicine is learning to keep alive the people whom the western, commercial diet is making sick. It's extending the lives of people with heart disease and working on obesity and diabetes. This is all a lucrative business, diet pills and insulin pumps, for every over indulgence a remedy (not a preventative or cure) but not an education either.
I firmly believe there is a huge gap in the market for 'ordinary' women like myself who only aim to help people who are struggling with the basics. Forget your duck a l'orange and your fondant potatoes, many women are hard pushed to cook a Shepherd's pie or some homemade chips!
My friend Clarrie and her partner Jas, a young couple with a year old baby, take it in turns to cook. Clarrie does lots of experimenting with recipes for baby Todd, steaming lots of lovely fresh vegetables, whilst Jas is a dab hand at traditional roasts, shepherd's pie and toad in the hole.
This is a couple who could so easily be living on 89p pizzas from Iceland, or slurry filled, processed lasagne for a couple of quid. But they are passionate about what they eat, particularly since the arrival of Todd. Clarrie sent me a photo of Jas's toad in the hole recently and it spurred me on to cook it myself. A simple classic dish where the only criteria is outdoor bred, good quality pork sausages, ask your butcher to grind some pork and make your sausages, if buying from a supermarket, check for a high meat content and avoid sausages with ingredients you don't recognise. Teamed with mashed potatoes and beans, this is a delicious mid week meal.
Jas's toad in the hole
Recipe
Serves 4
3 large free-range eggs
I00g self raising flour
250ml semi-skimmed milk
Sea Salt
12 sausages
Whisk the eggs, flour and milk and a pinch of salt in a bowl, then pour into a jug
Preheat the oven 240c/gas 9
Put the sausages into a sturdy roasting tray, toss with olive oil and cook in the oven for 10-15minutes until evenly golden
Remove dish from the oven and while spitting hot, pour in the batter, put straight into the middle of the oven, cook for 10 minutes or until the pudding is fluffy, golden and puffing up at the sides
'Food is a central activity of mankind and one of the single most significant trademarks of a culture.'
- Mark Kurlansky
Love Donna xxxxxxx
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