I rarely watch commercial television as the regular blaring, disruptive ads drive me crazy. In addition to this aversion, the last house I lived in had very poor reception for channel 10, so for both these reasons I missed the first series of Masterchef. However, I was not oblivious to it, as almost every stranger who found out in the course of conversation that I am writing a cookbook commented “oh. you’ll have to go on Masterchef!”.
There are several reasons I have no interest in going on Masterchef. In no particular order, they are:
I have no interest in getting into the restaurant trade
I have no interest in competing over food, my love is in sharing it
I enjoy being relaxed while I cook, and I enjoy the rhythm of moving around my own kitchen, and so am not interested in cooking under pressure in an alien kitchen
Beyond this disinterest in competing on the show, there has been something else nagging at me about it which is only starting to crystallise, and I think in essence it is about the cult of the chef and the cult of the high end restaurant. Let me be clear that my concerns are not about the existence of great chefs and great restaurants – it is a joy that such passion exists and gives us such memorable and sensual experiences if we are lucky to eat their food. Neither am I offended by the show itself. When I did catch an episode, the judges, all incredibly experienced and passionate, expressed no gratuitous nastiness but rather were constructive in their criticisms and assistance.
My concerns have been crystallised by the phenomenon of Masterchef, rather than being about it per se. If a nationwide Gallup poll were to ask a representative sample of the Australian population questions such as
has watching Masterchef taught you useful techniques? (hopefully yes)
have you used those techniques in your home cooking? (hopefully yes)
does watching Masterchef increase or decrease your confidence in your own cooking? (hopefully increase)
do you use recipe ideas from Masterchef in your home cooking? (hopefully yes)
and if all answers were affirmative, then maybe I’d drop my concern, and be happy that it is part of a reawakening of skill and passion for cooking amongst Australian home cooks. But the thing is that home cooking is an entirely different creature to high end restaurant cooking. It has a lot more in common with the many wonderful mostly plain cafe style ethnic restaurants that fill our cities and large towns, where flavour sails high above the altar of presentation. A plate of cleaved roast duck in the local pub Chinese restaurant was so perfect (and so cheap) that if they hadn’t moved on I would have started to resemble a duck myself. The visual joy was in the sight of the burnished crispy skin, but certainly nothing about the jumble of chunks on the plate resembled food art.
And to talk of home cooking…most of the key food memories tucked away in my brain are of encountering flavours and textures of home cooked food.  Feather-light sponges, scones, ribbon sandwiches, caramel tarts, boozy trifles on offer at community functions when I was a kid; Gran’s perfectly roasted chicken; the moist pleasure of the family chocolate cake, and the gooey decadence of the family chocolate pudding; my first Beef Wellington late at night out on Veni’s farm; my mate Pete’s mum’s Peroggi; slow roasted tomatoes, and roast beef studded with garlic and basted in red wine; the moment when my sister Ness perfected the PWMU golden syrup dumpling recipe by adding way more lemon juice and lemon rind…the list goes on, and on.
Another memory, from the top end of the restaurant scale: quail consomme arriving before me at the age of 10 in Mietta’s restaurant in North Fitzroy. The consomme was a clear deep brown, with a minute poached quail’s egg resting on its surface. The simple visuals echoed the flavours – a wonderful balance of deep burnished caramel, saltiness and smooth velvet texture. It still ranks as one of my food epiphanies, an experience that has remained crisp in my food memory.
Back to the ethnic restaurant memory bank; at Thy Thy Vietnamese restaurant in Victoria St Richmond, where I sampled my first ever Vietnamese coleslaw. Thy Thy is a cheap cavernous restaurant closer in appearance and rowdy efficiency to a cafe or canteen. The mix of textures and flavours of the Vietnamese coleslaw was entirely different to anything I’d eaten thus far in my life (I was about 18 at the time); an arresting mix of saltiness, crunch, pungent fish sauce and Vietnamese mint flavours, chilli heat, soft bite of poached chicken, and the cool sweetness of raw shredded cabbage and carrot. My visual memory remains also, of a generous pile plonked on the plate. However pedestrian the presentation, if I call up that image I start salivating. It’s delights impelled me to learn how to make it myself, and now I can savour Vietnamese coleslaw in my own kitchen.
Similarly, the boisterous bonhomie of nights spent at Alaysa Turkish restaurant with uni mates consuming vast plates of varied dips and fresh pita bread inspired me to learn how to make these delights myself. There is a sense in many ethnic restaurants in particular of eating in the home – the food is largely what the restauranteurs eat at home (along with many more delicacies that don’t make it to restaurant menu lists), and it is often family serving and cooking for you. It is easier to translate these dishes into home cooking because it is clear that they are dishes that have been cooked in millions of homes, sometimes for thousands of years. The best of these often cheap, often vibrant ethnic restaurants engender a sense of cross-cultural fraternity, a sharing from one home cook to another. I have had many a conversation in such restaurants with staff who have generously shared, often in great detail, the methods and ingredients involved in making the dish in question.
The difference between Mietta’s – and in contrast Thy Thy and Alaysa, and my seminal home cooked food experiences – is probably in what I might term accessible flavours. The quail consomme at Mietta’s was such a work of culinary perfection that I have no doubt that hours of time, attention and technique went in to creating it. The Vietnamese coleslaw at Thy Thy was evidently a quick, fresh compiled salad that, given some simple knowledge about ingredients and techniques, one could make at home. Ditto for the dips at Alaysa, where I learnt that charring the eggplant was the magical process that produced the lush smoky flavour of the Baba Ganoush. Ditto also for the grilled seafood or Casuela at the Robbie Burns Hotel’s Spanish kitchen, and many other ethnic eating experiences that have shaped my palate and what I cook at home. And I still hold a clear memory, from about the age of fourteen, of the first time I ate a crispy skinned baked potato loaded with generous amounts of butter, sour cream and finely chopped chives at Annie and Ian’s home.
As a passionate home cook, my concern is that more home cooks cook real food and enjoy doing so. That is why I am writing a cookbook for home cooks. It is why I am involved in the local food movement. And it is why I am keen to see far more people enjoying the delights of their own kitchen garden, and produce that has been grown locally rather than imported from half way around the world or from the other end of the country.
I have some reservations that the celebrity chef phenomenon, and the rise of concepts such as Masterchef, create a sense that ‘good’ cooking is something that is far too complex or time consuming to achieve night by night at home after a day’s work. I wonder whether there is a food culture out there in homes where staple weekly fare includes a lot of things out of bottles, tins, freezers and take away shops, fitfully punctuated by a special dinner party or from-scratch home cooked meal.
I personally am not interested in us being a nation of aspiring chefs and restauranteurs. I am certainly interested in us being a nation of fantastic home cooks, equipped with the techniques, tips and tricks that make producing great food every day of the week easy, with knowledge of and access to locally grown seasonal produce and the skills and recipes to utilise it well. Homes full of seasonal flavours, simple fresh foods, happy cooks, happy eaters. Home kitchens that do not feel eclipsed by the world of fine dining, but enjoy the experience of fine dining as an experience in itself, supplementary to the daily delights of the home table. I thus hope that the rising interest in chefs and restaurant style food is part of a wider embracing of the simple joys of good food, and not a phenomenon that alienates people from the simple and accessible possibilities of delightful, flavoursome home cooking.
© Clare Richards 2009
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