Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

FINE EATING

Once upon a time, and it seems a long time ago now, there used to be a British television show broadcast just before the six o’clock news, around the time dinner was being prepared. It was called Masterchef and it was a modest show. Research (i.e. Wikipedia) tells me that, as originally designed, it ran from 1990 to 2001. Its format was simple. Two English chaps, both experienced chefs, would host aspiring chefs and get them to prepare meals which they would then judge. If I remember rightly, at the end of the show an aspirant either got dismissed or won a contract to chef in a real restaurant. Or maybe this happened only at the end of the season – frankly I can’t remember all the details.

What I do remember, however, is that it was a simple show in a simple studio setting - a little competitive, of course, but with both of the adjudicators relatively polite to the contestants. Even more vividly, I recall that this early Masterchef was sometimes a boost to my morale. As it played when I was (sometimes) preparing the evening meal, I would be dashing between the kitchen and the television to see how the skills of the aspiring chefs compared with my own skills.

Let me make it clear that my cooking abilities are very limited. As my wife and family are always ready to tell me, I have at most three or four simple recipes to produce a meal. But at least it is an edible meal. And this was what heartened me about the original Masterchef. The aspirant chefs were, by and large, devising meals that could be eaten at the domestic dinner table. They were not aiming for cordon bleu all the time, although haute cuisine sometimes came into it; and the ingredients they were using tended to be very accessible ones. I soon picked up that, for all my limited skills (and for all my wife’s much greater skills), what we were eating at home was just as nutritious, and almost as presentable, as anything the aspirant masterchefs came up with.

Masterchef was “rebooted” in 2005 and became the monstrous and redundant thing it now is – a hyped-up show with a logo, sometimes involving celebrity chefs and celebrity aspirants, with dramatic music, competitions held in a large hall with the camera swooping dramatically down and about the benches where teams of competitors are harassed by hectoring adjudicators, false suspense built into the idea of who will win, and generally resonant of a Las Vegas show rather than your home kitchen. It’s no longer screened here at about dinner time and I haven’t bothered watching it for years.

But I have still kept the simple lesson that the original Masterchef taught me. As food worth eating, what is served in a restaurant is no better for you, and probably no more nutritious and no more palatable, than what you are easily able to prepare at home, even if you are a mediocre cook like me.

So why do we ever go to restaurants at all?

We may have heard of some fabulous recipe served in a particular establishment. Indeed we may be real connoisseurs who, without faking it, are able to identify what culinary techniques were used in preparing the food we are eating, and how that food compares with the work of other chefs. But the great majority of us are not such connoisseurs. As often as not, going to a restaurant is more a matter of socialising than getting a meal. We might enjoy the company and conversation. We might enjoy being served. We might enjoy not having to prepare a meal ourselves. We might enjoy the milieu. I’ve sometimes heard people argue in terms of aesthetics, that is, we might enjoy how the food looks when it is served to us. But only rarely are we there because we actually need a meal. We are there for an “occasion”, not for sustenance.

There’s another problem that occurs to me. I once heard a vigneron expounding on wines and how they are enjoyed. But, he added as a warning, often people admire and claim to have savoured a certain wine in the setting of a restaurant or on a happy occasion when they are holidaying. But when they buy exactly the same wine from a vintner and drink it at home, they sometimes complain that it doesn’t taste so good, or that perhaps they have bought the one bottle that was somehow “off”.

The reality is that it was the setting (restaurant or holiday) that made them enjoy that particular wine in the first place because they were already enjoying the occasion. The intrinsic qualities of the wine itself had little to do with it.

Thus too, I think, with restaurant meals. Not being a puritan, I’m happy to enjoy a meal in a restaurant with friends, but not while claiming a false connoisseurship over the bill of fare. And Lord save me from those asses who confuse dining out with Culture and imagine they are showing their sophistication while pretending to assess thoughtfully the wine or the filet mignon.

Always remember, you are paying for what can essentially be done at home, and at a fraction the cost.