h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

...seems to be to find something nobody's done before, and then make a big thing out of it. Delia Smith did very well with this, by simply being one of the first celebrity chefs she's got an eternal aura of respectibility and sense about her . Not to mention her various obsessions - capers, limes, a particular brand of sea salt.

Others, as you have mentioned, go for style. Ainsley and his over-exuberant very messy way of cooking, involving getting lots of powdered ingredients all over the worktop while waving the other hand in the air and doing some kind of dance... it's entertaining for a while but gets old quickly.

Personally I prefer the Nigella Lawson approach. She rarely uses any ingredient I've heard of before, but that's okay, because you get to watch someone who obviously loves food preparing things you'd never dream of making in your own kitchen simply because that one little shake of salt would cost more than your mortgage payments for the last decade.

But as was rightly pointed out, it's just so much fun to watch!

I had forgotten about Ainsley's dance routine.. oh well, another image to haunt my dreams.
I think that there is something essentially absurd about cooking on television. And the absurdity is hugely magnified when you add "personality" into the mix. Take someone who is really genuinely famous - say Tom Cruise. Now, imagine them doing a cooking program. Stupid idea? Definitely. Therefore, the opposite is also absurd - someone with little or no true personality does cooking on TV and then tries to be a personality also.

Well, they can't possibly be known for the quality of their food, can they?

Although the Two Fat Ladies were excellent really - very funny, witty programmes in which they cooked food no other TV cook of the time would dare to cook due to the fat content. They also did it in a way that nobody else would've dared... Jennifer Patterson always used to wear nail varnish and rings while sticking her hands into the food - raw meat, dough, you name it - in contravention of all the unwritten rules and what we're taught about hygiene during food preparation. I always seem to have this vision of the two of them sitting up late at night writing recipes and thinking 'Ah, this dish is only twenty-six percent fat by weight. Let's pour a half-pound of melted butter on it before it goes in the oven'.

Aaah, I miss that programme.

And something else I just thought of - if you were a TV chef, what would your style be?

I think I'll put that on Ask h2g2.

I'm not sure what my style would be. I certainly wouldn't be able to take it seriously.

I think my favourite chef is Nigel Slater. He wrote a book called "Appetite" which was pitched as a kind of manifesto against the myth of the perfect recipie. For any particular meal, he just lists the main things, with suggested weights, and few timings and then adds in stuff he likes as suggestions. He devotes pages to take away meals too. The idea is that basically, if you like it, throw it in and be creative. I learned a lot from that.

Thanks for the mention on "Ask H2G2". I have no idea what they show on the BBC these days. I don't live in the UK anymore and I don't watch TV anymore either. The article was all based on memories. You see, you watch these things and have no idea on the impact they could be making on the brain...

Another gimmick I've noticed is to have a foreign accent.

From Martin Yan (Chinese) to Wolfgang Puck (Austrian) to Julia Child (I don't know what sort of accent she has, but it sure doesn't sound American), lots of TV chefs in America capitalize on being from a different country in order to make their cooking seem more legitimate.

I don't mind foreign accents per say - heck, I'm 'foreign' meself. And cooking from around the world is interesting in itself. More annoying is when people hijack a cliched image of a country and use that to sell themselves and their cooking. Its the desperation to make a mark of personality in cooking programs that I think is ironic.

Yes, I didn't mean that having an accent per se is bad. It's when it's overdone to make oneself stand out when it becomes annoying.