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Posted on 17-8-07 Gordon Ramsey Renders Gastronomy Tasteless
By Binoy Kampmark
Doctor, gastronomy is disappearing, and with it the last of the old
civilisation. Louis XVIII to Corvisart
Seeing food prepared on screen is an indictment on us all. Tinned food may
have provided us with less than healthy hints about a declining
civilisation, but when chefs become tele-wrestling monsters juggling with
cleaver and clove, the extinction of gastronomy may be richly deserved.
Which bring us to a man who is more cleaver than clove. How has Gordon
Ramsey stifled, if not strangled his opposition into culinary irrelevance?
The answer is elementary, dear eater. Ramsey's success over his
competitors (Hell's Kitchen, the F Word) lies in how he has taken the food
out of cooking. The 'f' word is the message.
So, to counter the smooth urbane Keith Floyd, the 'f' work is conveniently
thrust into on-screen conversation, be it with rival, guest or sub-species
employee. It is a jolt which is bound to unsettled Floyd's ubiquitous wine
glass, suggesting target practice against bourgeois minders of the art of
food. It was they, Floyd sneered, who would look at the programme. The
East Enders brigade might as well have not bothered. But today, it is
precisely that same brigade who buy Ramsey's books. You too, can cook
Michelin-ranked cuisine.
The 'f' word also floors another chef. It wakes you up as you dose looking
at Delia Smith's next recipe for apple crumble. Yes, Delia, I was asleep,
and the apple now looks crumbled. But not so with Ramsey, who darts back
and forth like a whippet, controlling his staff with orders and vitriol,
to the tune of Michelin star awards.
One philosopher complained that staying still would kill him. If Ramsey
stops, we might actually get a chance to look, let along digest the nature
of his culinary material. One doesn't watch him to get a sense of enjoying
food one watches Ramsey. He attracts the show, not the taste. Hell's
Kitchen is about as gastronomic as a Toyota car assembly.
There is much to suggest that taste is farthest from Ramsey's mind: watch
me, maker of dishes that cannot be made or sampled. It is the image that
is consumed, not the meal. So, Barclays, or rather its employees,
demonstrated the civic maturity of the banker by expending 44 thousand
pounds at his restaurant Pétrus some five years ago. The food was not the
show it was free. The wine wasn't: the tipplers were drinking the Ramsey
phenomenon and were thankfully sacked for their indiscretions.
The film speed is no less comforting. He burns a blistering pace on
screen, aided and abetted by his camera. You wonder whether he is trying
to be the Roger Bannister of the kitchen world aided by a crew with severe
attention-deficit disorder. Where did that garlic go, Gordon? Did you
allow the onions to caramelise? Of course he did, but we never get a sense
about it.
True, the nature of modern television is a latticework of editing and
sub-edits, but no editing could have possibly taken away from Delia's
soporific appeal. Disturbed only by revelations that she might be
vociferous after a drink at a foot ball fixture, Delia's method is so
laborious she sends her viewers seeking a pillow and warm blanket. Pass
the cookies, please. With Floyd, it was the temptation to empty the liquor
cabinet and tour Provence with the spirit of that long gone glutton
Brillat-Savarin, in that order.
Food should be there to be enjoyed, but Ramsey's triumph is food's
failure. At least Floyd conveyed the illusion that food had to be mulled
over. Even more invitingly is the flaws that come with cooking. The
perfect meal is inevitably larded with imperfections. We know that the
preparations put into cooking shows are time-consuming, hideously
expensive and heartbreaking. The weather could come at any moment and blow
the ingredients into the sea. Then, Floyd the adventurer, posing as local
chef, could botch the local meal. Such is the nature of mouth-watering
gastronomy.
But it is perhaps unsurprising that a world of You Tube, the world wide
web and twenty four hour television one should tolerate Ramsey's
scrambling in front of the camera. The modern everyday life, says Paul
Virilio, is one of 'mobility, of mobilisation, of forgetting, of habits,
of repetition'. To a food purist, Ramsey should be garrotted while being
fed a bottle of Chateau Petrus Pomerol 1947. As should his camera crew.
Binoy Kampmark is Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He
can reached at: bkampmark@gmail.com
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