Great British Menu

There's a new series of Great British Menu, the tv contest which brings together the local food thing and Masterchef-style competitive cookery by bringing chefs from around the country to represent their region.

In the March 20th heat of the regional selection round, 4 northerners cooked against each other. The winners were a Yorkshireman (adopted) and a Lancastrian, Anthony Flinn and Nigel Haworth.

Here is the recipe for Flinn's winning dish, Cannelloni of cucumber and cream cheese with muscovado jelly and yoghurt ice cream. It apparently takes one to two hours to cook and has so many ingredients in it's not funny. (There's not a huge amount of regionality here either - unless the oats in the caramel on top.)

Flinn used to work at El Bulli so he does all that molecular gastronomy thing. This kind of food is great to eat. It has also started to trickle down to British cooking more widely, with innovations such as Heston Blumenthal's triple-cooked chips reaching a wider audience. However, as a spectator sport I find this kind of cooking a bit dull. If you couldn't possibly hope to replicate it at home, watching tv cookery becomes a detached affair, consisting of admiring from a distance rather than eagerly engaging.

But there is another reason to be concerned by this. Joanna Blythman puts her finger on it. In her book, Bad Food Britain, she writes,

'The balance of culinary power in Britain has now swung away from the domestic zone, where its keepers were women who passed on their accumulated knowledge, with their egos held well in check, to the male zone, where its new luminaries are a bunch of flashy performance artists....The focus of food fashion has become more rarefied, arcane and preoccupied with the endless pursuit of novelty; in fact, it is entirely detached from most Britons' domestic cooking experience.'

And why should this matter? Because it makes people feel that cooking is something difficult, even unattainable. Blythman goes on to quote Arabella Weir:

'All that plethora of cookery shows really does is make me feel insecure. They don't make me think, "Oh, what a great thing to do with scallops and chives." I just think, "Oh God! I'm just a fat oaf who lives in a horrible kitchen!'"

Cucumber cannelloni or Delia's cheaty tinned mince special - there doesn't seem to be an awful lot in the middle at the moment....