Although I’ve read thousands of books during the various lockdowns this week, I’ve also found time to engage with Masterchef Australia. I was planning to write a conceptually overambitious and ultimately meandering book review, but my mind turns instead to the cooking competition. It’s been through watching, here and there, hours of Masterchef Australia that I have come to many Breakthroughs in my Thinking on Food, Art and (in some Small Way) Everything In The Universe. My thoughts on Lucy Ellmann’s last novel must wait. 

 

Masterchef is a show à la television in which amateur chefs cook themselves silly to become a top chef (or Master Mensch, for short). In the Australian version, the winning contestant earns a column in a popular food magazine and $250,000. This booty goes towards realizing the winner’s food dream, whether that be opening a seaside restaurant, launching a food brand, or not having their house repossessed. 

 

I’ve been watching late-stage Gary, George and Matt seasons. Each host is in bold form, their flavours having been elevated to an extravagant pitch of baroque. From these hubristic heights, none can foresee restaurant underpayment scandals followed by ruthlessly Mandelson-esque overhauls. In these halcyon days, the almost sickly-suave Hagrid eroticism of Matthew is balanced out perfectly with the light Aegean fragrance of George and the roasty-toasty chicken skin grease of Gary. 

 

Craggy faced warlord Gordon Ramsay sometimes joins the Aussies, but Gordon’s muscular barking is a Jack Russell’s yap in the wind when compared merely to the death’s stare of Marco Pierre White. MPW, before, on a matter of sworn vengeance, defecting to rival franchise Hell’s Kitchen, would occasionally emerge from the depths of Hades when the Masterchef Australia contestants needed the sh*t scared out of them. Striding forth from the heart of darkness, Marco screams in calm whispers; contestants can only remember the encounter as an icy wind caressing their bones. 

 

As a treat for getting through this traumatic ordeal, the contestants are generally allowed one week of relaxation and luxury. During this period of recompense, Lady Diana herself, as played by Nigella Lawson, graces the studio floor. 

 

It’s a tour de force of a show and, perhaps most surprisingly for a programme which technically shares DNA with Masterchef USA, the contestants tend not to be a thunderously arrogant fleet of bin bags. 

 

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It’s week 41. Aspiring chefs have come and gone. A whole lot of semifreddo has been proffered for the three presenter-judges. But this week, Nobel Prize in Physics winner Heston Blumenthal has also joined the team. The contestants are ecstatic, none more so than Callan, the 18 year old experimentalist-in-residence. 

 

Callan is an aspiring molecular gastronomist. Undoubtedly cooking fought it out with magic tricks (which he probably called ‘illusionism’) as his main passions through his teenage years (which, during the competition, he’s still technically in. So fair play).

 

In week 17, Callan makes a soufflé out of shadows. By week 30’s Invention Test, his broth somehow offers a critique of logical positivism. It doesn’t quite work, but the judges appreciate his ingenuity. Callan says: “It was risky to make a broth out of metaphysical concepts, but it was the invention test and you have to go for it!”

 

Needless to say, Callan is pleased as sh*t that Heston is in the house. On the arrival of Maidenhead’s tastiest science man, Callan flips out. Like an alarmingly delirious puppy, he is just about pissing himself in excitement. Visions of show-stopper dry ice cloud his mind. An amuse-bouche which playfully combines vegemite and popcorn is used as smelling salts to bring him back. 

 

Like a funk and soul tribute act, Heston’s week is in four parts: earth, air, fire and water. The location of the final team challenge of the week, fire, is taking place on the Murray salt flats. The conditions predictably soon turn the one English contestant into a sundried bollock. Arum’s modest hope was to run a country pub. Now, his face is garnished with sand and his crumbling hair pricked quiff-ways to the burning sky. His dry, dusty speech is like that of a sci-fi protagonist explaining to his team at base camp that it was a big mistake to visit The Sun Planet.

 

At what cost? Like a painting of a paint brush, it’s conceptually messy and creatively boring to have food represent fire. Moreover, the problem with using food as language in a concept meal (the charred remnants of Arum might be thinking) is that dishes tell a richer story when not forcibly attached to an abstract concept. 

 

Combinations of ingredients might tell you something about ancient customs, or patterns of migration between continents. A meal might give you an understanding of terrain and climate. Food can teach you about languages and dialects. It can offer an account of culture across sections of society within a country, city, town, village. 

 

To be fair to Heston Blumenthal – and I’m sure the 6 Michelin star chef will be pleased to have my seal of approval – he has frequently delved into many aspects of British culinary history over the years in The Hind’s Head in Bray, Dinner by Heston Blumenthal in London and his book Historic Heston (2013). 

 

His whistle-stop tour through conceptual cooking in Masterchef Australia, however, raises issues as to whether the approach of telling stories with food as a sensory language works all that well. Rather than using recipes to tell a story through the associations which the ingredients and flavours already have with personal and collective histories, most contestants, when encouraged to get creative, would offer up something one-dimensional. 

 

In one case, a contestant, in a brilliant display of children’s school project cuisine, makes a pudding which at a push, whilst squinting, and when you don’t know what mountains look like, looks like a mountain. This tells the story that pudding doesn’t really look all that much like a mountain, and that food, when used as paint, is far less effective than paint. 

 

If a meal has been conceived of and delivered with care, its sensory stimuli won’t need to be used to paint a literal picture of an abstract concept to get the eater interested about its provenance. Their interest in the story behind the meal will be set off by the textures, tastes, scents and colours existing on the plate, on their own terms, as food. 

 

Turning food explicitly into visual art risks confusing this process. It transforms the dish into one of those metaphors which doesn’t actually help explain anything. So, you want to know about Native American history and how it relates to the identity of this restaurant? I won’t tell you, and I won’t give you Native American food, but I WILL explain via some colourful chocolate feathers which offer a humorous play on traditional war bonnets! 

 

Although I just made up this italicized example, I believe it’s fair enough that I rest a good deal of my argument upon it. 

 

Back to Masterchef Australia’s four elements for Heston week. If you look at a plate of food which features orange and yellow components, where a central element (aside from Arum’s face) has been charred, and you’ve been told that the theme of the meal is fire, there isn’t really all that much story being told, nor much engagement from the eater asked for by the chef. What you have instead is a rudimentary cognitive exercise which might recall playbooks or toys intended to teach babies to connect words with corresponding images. 

 

This would be fine were this genre of cuisine being offered at nurseries. Problems arise when this approach is being couched in pretensions of complex and witty storytelling. What you end up with is a very simple story (fire is hot and orangey) which people might mistake as being a complex story because it’s being told with food which has been crafted through difficult processes. 

 

This means that, in some cases of concept cooking, the meal makes the eater feel as though they are participating in something intelligent without requiring them to think about anything in detail. The eater is just required to look at it, register that it’s in some way experimental, and then eat it. 

 

The tension is that, though the chef may have used experimental lateral thinking, the story being told is dizzyingly simple, and generally can be consumed without a moment’s thought. It carries the obvious signifiers of experimentation (like a book which spans 998 pages of internal monologue which is made up of short, simple clauses all starting with ‘the fact that’) but it doesn’t pose any difficulties in processing it (like a book which spans 998 pages of internal monologue which is made up of short, simple clauses all starting with ‘the fact that’) because you just eat it and feel rather smug about being involved.

 

First fat duck: Hang on there! I don’t think he’s still discussing the kind of food that would be served at The Fat Duck … You don’t suppose he’s now talking about Lucy Ellmann’s novel Ducks, Newburyport, do you? If so, it seems he’s arguing against food being used as a poorly suited metaphor, whilst using the food in question as an (I would argue) poorly suited metaphor.

 

Second fat duck: Quack quack quack quack quack quack quack.  

 

First fat duck: You’re quite right. I wouldn’t be speaking English. I don’t think Elliott has understood how best to use us as a medium of communication. Still, it’s all rather experimental and creative and fun, don’t you think?

Second fat duck: Quack.