A Kitchen Isn't Just For Christmas!

I can honestly say, hand on heart, that I have never counted Food Porn among my (many) vices. 

Okay, so I may have trotted alongside The Galloping Gourmet* in the 1970s.

And lovingly clipped and collected recipes from Frances Bissell’s cookery columns in the 1980s (in spite of only having a single-ring antique Baby Belling in my bedsit)

Before following her Times colleague, Giles Coren’s, restaurant picks across London in the 1990s, with the arrival of ‘entertaining’ expense accounts…

But it was only when visiting a dear friend every Saturday morning in his Streatham care home that I witnessed the pivotal role that food programmes can play in daytime TV.

The BBC’s Saturday Kitchen is a bit like a Dr Who’s Tardis. It feels much, much longer once you’re inside it (more like sixteen hours than ninety minutes) and, like CS Lewis’s wardrobe, it is a portal to strange worlds and creatures:

Cornwall’s most celebrated adopted son, Rick Stein, sent trekking across Italy;

A couple of aging North Country Trolls, aka ‘The Hairy Bikers,’ seemingly circumnavigating South America and Asia;

And Nigella Lawson (who everyone knows is from the planet Venus) enticing VIP guests up into her food ‘heaven.’

Indeed, The Kitchen’s guest book reads like a veritable Who’s Who of The Business Pleasure, from musical theatre’s own dynamic duo, Ball and Boe, to Walford’s Tanya Branning and Ian ‘the eel’ Beale, to megastars from the food/music continuum Craig ‘Just Eat’ David, Sophie ‘Disco Kitchen’ Ellis Bextor and Paul ‘Wherever I Lay My Plate’ Young.

And if this magnificent cornucopia of talent isn’t to your taste, you can always switch channels to ITV’s James Martin’s Saturday Morning Show and watch, well …more celebrity chefs and guests.

But the sit-down, all-you-can-eat, viewing buffet is by no means confined to the low(er) budget wastelands (and bulging waistlines) of daytime TV. 

At its peak in 2014, MasterChef, the brainchild and bankroll of Quadrophenia director, Franc Roddam, reached 6.4 million viewers.

An achievement dwarfed by the 2016 Final of the Great British Bake Off which grabbed 14.8 million viewers in its flour-caked fingers, making it the most watched television show of that year.

But away from the cameras, what is the enduring appeal of food preparation that has persuaded so many prominent members of The Business of Pleasure to don the pinny and oven gloves?

Playwrights as diverse as Anton Chekhov, Tennessee Williams and Samuel Beckett

(do read Beckett’s description of making a toasted cheese sandwich in his novel More Pricks Than Kicks, but not when you’re hungry);

Composers Leonard Bernstein, Giuseppe Verdi and David Byrne (Talking Breads?)

Chanteuses Madonna, Taylor Swift and Beyonce ‘Make Lemon Drizzle’ Carter

Film Stars  Great Garbo (meals for one, obs) Robert ‘Mean Sweets’ De Niro, and Marlon Brando (when staying in London, Brando would take friends to a Chinese eatery in Raynes Park and cook the meals himself in the restaurant’s kitchen)

What is cooking’s secret sauce?

One recent paper proposes the following recipe: **

 ‘...As stated by De Certeau in his book, The Practice of Everyday Life, “The characteristically subtle logic of ordinary activities comes to light only in details.” Currently, within research and within the American default lifestyle, there may be an under appreciation of the positive effects of cooking, perhaps due to its framing as a chore or activity, thus obscuring our understanding of its contribution to well-being.  Cooking’s role in well-being may become illuminated through research, interventions and messaging that put forth its connections to PERMA (Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment) facets such as positive affect, meaning, and achievement and their associated benefits. Research is needed to identify aspects of cooking that promote psychosocial well-being to change this perspective and, ideally over time, the associated health outcomes related to risk for chronic disease.’

This Boxing Day, as we gather together for the Feast of Stephen (or, more likely, 500 recipes for turkey leftovers) we are uniting around a tradition that goes back to 415 AD.  But communal feasting goes back far, far further into the mists of time, and its primary function, that of strengthening bonds between individuals and communities, has even been observed among our near relatives the chimpanzees.  

But it seems that Law of Unintended Consequences was perhaps as prevalent with our distant ancestors as it is today, and it is quite possible that the longer term effects of communal feasting, and the large-scale food production required, may have been a sociological game-changer that puts the impact of AI on a par with the invention of spaghetti hoops (delicious as they may be on Samuel Beckett’s toast embers):

‘In accordance with Hayden’s*** thoughts, it seems obvious that repetitive feasts of the amplitude implied at Göbekli Tepe (15 kilometres from Urfa, S.E. Turkey) must have placed stress on the economic production of hunter-gatherer groups. Maybe in response to the demand, new food sources and processing techniques were explored.  In this scenario, religious beliefs and practices may have been a key factor in the adoption of cultivation and the transition to agriculture. Archaeological and chemical evidence further suggests that this innovation may have been fueled by alcoholic beverages, giving a new response to Braidwood’s question ‘Did man once live by beer alone?’  Probably not, but beer -and wine- may have played an important role in one of the most significant turning points in the history of mankind.'

So Bon Appetit.

And Bottoms Up!

DT

26th December, 2025