T Get Much Tougher Than This' - Masterchef and Competitive Cooking
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Brighton Research Portal 'Cooking doesn't get much tougher than this' - MasterChef and competitive cooking In a 1983 satirical short story, Margaret Atwood imagined a future in which cooking has become a macho competitive sport: Exclusive clubs and secret societies sprang up. Men meeting . would now exchange special handshakes - the Béchamel twist, the chocolate mousse double grip - to show that they had been initiated. It was pointed out to the women . that chef after all means chief . (Atwood, p. 54) By 2005, this was no longer a satire; the initiation was visibly there to be seen on the television series MasterChef, a programme in which masculinity came to predominate. MasterChef had once been a BBC cookery show in which ordinary people demonstrated their culinary skills; it was shown once a week in a sleepy Sunday afternoon slot. While there was competition for the title of 'MasterChef', it was the cooking rather than the competition that was foregrounded, and the emphasis was emphatically on amateur rather than professional chefs. The first presenter, Loyd Grossman, wrote in 1993: 'We believed there is no place from snobbism and pretention (sic) in our red, yellow and blue kitchens . What consistantly (sic)impressed me and everyone who works on the series is the coolness under fire of our amateurs' (Grossman, p. 7). A new format for MasterChef was first screened on British television in 2005, the same year that saw the first series of The Apprentice, now under the title MasterChef Goes Large and produced by Elizabeth Murdoch’s company, Shine. In its new version, MasterChef Goes Large abandoned the celebration of the amateur and set out to make the competition element more aggressive, as one of the judges, John Torode put it: ‘When we transformed the old MasterChef into MasterChef Goes Large we wanted to up the pace and make the series more hard-hitting, so it was relevant to the way we live today’. (Torode, 2005 p.8) The new format was much more intensive and the competitive element more foregrounded; the judgement of each cook made on camera rather than the discreet and hidden assessments of the earlier formulation. The television cookery programme does have a greater claim to the Reithian principle that the purpose of television is to ' entertain, inform and educate' than many other forms of contemporary lifestyle programming, in that it does set out to teach its audience skills and it is concerned with knowledge transfer. The first appearance of cooking on the BBC was precisely to inform the public of how to make the best of scarce rations during a period of war; over the course of the war, there were, as Asa Briggs estimates: ’ 1,196’ wartime broadcasts on food’ (Briggs, 1995 p.274). Lord Woolton, the Minister for Food, ‘made a point of giving a personal explanation on the wireless’ when new policies were introduced ' (Calder, p. 383). As early into the war as September 8th 1939, Mrs Arthur Webb introduced a morning programme ‘Making the Most of a Wartime Larder’. (Radio Times, September 4th). As Maggie Andrews explains: ‘the radio was seen as an obvious medium for propaganda on food, alongside women’s magazines, posters, leaflets public information films and an army of educators and lecturers . (Andrews, p. 92). A food advice leaflet issued by the Ministry of Food clearly addressed women as the Home Front, an integral part of the war effort: ‘Let the Food Advice Centre help YOU to win the war on the Kitchen Front’ (facsimile leaflet, in Gardiner, p. 19), another read ‘Food is a munition of war. DON’T WASTE IT’ (quoted in Lewis, p. 156). Kitchen Front was broadcast from 1940 as part of this second world war 'Home Front Programming' on the radio; it began at the suggestion of the Public Relations Division of the Ministry of Food (Briggs, 1985, p. 192) 1 and commanded an audience of well over 5 million listeners. With the involvement of school and hospital caterers, domestic science teachers and dieticians, Kitchen Front was broadcast four times a week and gave listeners expert advice on food preparation and nutrition. It was fronted by the characters ‘Gert and Daisy’ (played by the music hall act Elsie and Doris Waters) and the programme was supplemented with a weekly column in The Radio Times and features in women’s magazines. Such features made use of cartoon characters; ‘Potato Pete’ and ‘Dr Carrot’ joined ‘Mrs Sew and Sew’ of the Make do and Mend campaign as comical characters ,who like Gert and Daisy, gave Ministry advice a spin of entertainment. The 'housewife' was constructed as a key element in the war time campaign; in the words of another Ministry of Food recipe leaflet: You want to get through your work and difficulties with the same spirits you expect of the Forces in action . Well thanks to government planning the foods that will feed you and your family to the pitch of fighting fitness are right at your hand. To release ships and seamen on the fighting fronts, you, on the 'Kitchen Front' have the job of using these foods to the greatest advantage. (quoted in Patten, 2002, p. i) Kitchen Front on the radio was central to this government planning, an extension of propaganda campaigns exhorting the housewife (and the address is always to women) to avoid waste, to consume unrationed potatoes and explaining how to use 'foods to the greatest advantage' in the rationing which really began to bite in 1941. The presenter, Marguerite Patten, was a Home Economist who had been taken up by the Ministry of Food in 1942. Patten had initially cooked publically while demonstrating electric ovens for the North Metropolitan Electric supply company, and then worked for the Ministry of Food, giving war time cookery demonstrations for local authorities for the Ministry of Food Advice Bureau at Harrods. She understood such demonstrations to be essential war work: Throughout Britain Food Advice Centres were established, staffed by home economists . We gave demonstrations in the Centres, and in market squares, hospital out-patient departments, works' canteens, large stores . .we all felt that we were playing a vital role towards the ultimate victory' (Patten, 2002) Marguerite Patten was to go on to regularly broadcast for Woman’s Hour and became one of the earliest professional cooks on television with her cooking demonstrations on the magazine programme Designed for Women, broadcast from 1947, and continued to cook for Harrods after the war, to advise on how to cope with post war rationing. In America, early cookery broadcasting also emerged from radio shows which were sponsored by government agencies rather than commercial companies; as Collins explains: . homemaking shows hosted by the likes of Betty Crocker and the United States Department of Agriculture’s Aunt Sammy instructed women and kept them company in the kitchen from before the Great Depression to the end of World War II and after. Cooking via broadcasting was already a staple for American housewives by the time television emerged. (Collins, p. 2) After the war, rationing continued in Britain until 1954, and advice on making good nutritious meals on short supplies was still required for the nation. In 1952, Woman's Hour introduced 'two weekly food talks: ' based on available supplies. 'Planning the Week's Meals' gives ideas for complete family meals that are economical and nourishing' (Radio Times, January 25, 1952, p. 46). Patten continued to make regular appearances on Woman's Hour on BBC Radio, and began to move into television from 1946. From 1950, she co-presented Cookery Lesson with Philip Harben, who can be claimed as the first television celebrity chef. Like Patten, Harben's professional cooking experience had emerged from his wartime experience. He had enlisted in the Royal Air Force, but suffered an eye injury and so was assigned to the catering corps. Harben was the first presenter of the first ever BBC television programme, Cookery2, from 1946 to 1951, which was followed by Cookery Lesson. His 1945 book The Way to Cook or Common Sense in the Kitchen is presented as a 'modest introduction to the technique of cooking' (Harben, 1945 p. 6) with none of the flourishes later found in television chefs (most notably Fanny Cradock). Harben’s television appearances did nothing to make his approach any more elaborate; his 1951 Philip Harben's Television Cooking Book modestly explains: ‘I hope to show you in the simplest way possible something of the technique of this art which converts raw food material into delightful meals . We are going to approach the subject analytically - we shall take the machine to pieces, as it were, to see how it works’. His image of 'The Kitchen of the Future’ is a modernist understanding of the kitchen as 'A practical workshop such as craftsmanship requires' (Harben, 1951, p. 7-8). In this pragmatic approach to cooking, Harben shares with Marguerite Patten a democratic urge to share his knowledge and to explain techniques for the benefit of his audience; a spirit that emerged from the war time demonstrations that had shaped early broadcast cookery programmes, and from the context of post-war rationing that curtailed luxurious and elaborate menus. Cooking on the BBC was less about showing off his skills as a chef than it was about teaching the nation to make the most of scarce resources during rationing; as he explains: 'I started cooking on Television in April, 1946, when the service first reopened after the Second World War, and the food situation was still pretty grim.