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Cheating at food

Richard Sennett

Wednesday, 27th February 2008

Richard Sennett surveys The Table

‘Ecraser l’infâme!’ Voltaire proclaimed in his war on corrupt priests and crooked government officials. Delia’s Smith’s new book How to Cheat at Cooking opens up a whole new field of infamy: the culinary crime. As in 18th-century politics, so in 21st-century cuisine, it’s the public who gets cheated.

Madame Smith’s sassy title is meant to suggest you can get away with using frozen or canned ingredients and still make good food; the sassiness is a piece of nonsense. All cooks use store-prepared ingredients of one sort or another — pasta, ground coffee and ice-cream, to name just a few. It’s a question of which prepared ingredients you use and how you use them.

Madame Smith’s way is to employ packaged food for all the basics, and fresh ingredients for garnish or to add a bit of taste. Her use of packaged ingredients is cunning rather than cheating; she tells the reader which brands to use for each. As exercises in product placement, her recipes are a supermarket’s dream, but the dishes which result are anything but the stuff of dreams; after trying out a few of these recipes, I don’t think I’ve ever tasted such bland food.

Here’s how it works in making ‘Good Old Shepherd’s Pie’. You take 175g of ready-prepared diced mixed carrot/swede (Tesco) and fry it with four tablespoons of frozen diced onions. You then add 400g of tinned minced lamb (M&S). Over this mush you lay 16 discs of ‘Aunt Bessie’s Homestyle’ frozen mashed potato. (Why ‘Aunt Bessie’s’? One brand of frozen mashed potato is pretty much indistinguishable from any other.) The fresh ingredients are a few thyme leaves, though these are ‘temporarily out of stock’ at my local M&S each week, and strips of leek; Madame S. uses the white bottoms of the leeks rather than the tastier chopped tops. To finish it off, she then sprinkles on some ready-grated Cheddar. The result is fuel rather than food. You’d do better simply to buy a dish entirely ready-made. (Dare I suggest a product placement that is more upmarket? Waitrose.)

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