When a trend, like bread, is in the creeping early stages of going stale, not a lot of people will be willing to accept the fact straight away. Toasting and buttering something in the vain hope that it will be as it was in its prime is a great option when it’s for your own consumption and you are skilled at kidding yourself. What Jamie Oliver has gone and done with his new recipe book 5 Ingredients – Quick & Easy Food however, is a whole other loaf of sourdough altogether.
Oliver has taken a growing-stale-at-the-edges trend; toasted, buttered AND organic-strawberry-jam-coated it; made a book out of it, and is now attempting to flog this book at a target market, who will definitely know subpar bread when they see it.
The trend in question? Compressing worthy ideas/concepts/the noble art of good cooking into punchy, ‘quick & easy’ soundbites that will appease the twitchy attention spans of a social-media era. Reduced to speedy accessible clickbait, or the paperback equivalent, these are stripped of authenticity and originality in favour of conforming to a culture of rushing and racing with the mantra “Nothing worth saying is over 140 characters”.
It appears this trend is finally starting to taste sour in people’s mouths. Vines have died. Christmas 2017 favoured classic vinyl and literature over iTunes vouchers. Poor old Joe Wicks is riding out the last of his wave with a feeble new cookbook as his screechy 30-second slap-bang-voilà-style cooking videos are inevitably beginning to grate on people’s tolerances. And Jamie Oliver, well he’s doing his best to catch the same wave before it crashes.
Each recipe in 5 Ingredients contains, inescapably, a mere five ingredients. But how can a wholesome and substantial meal be created from so little? Jamie answers that one for us in his foreword: “Not every recipe gives you a balanced meal”. This was the first slash at authenticity that I noticed – any sense of awe I felt at the adeptness of creating a large book of meals with so little went out with a puff. Speaking of, puff pastry was another red warning sign. Recipes in the book like “Flaky Pastry Pesto Chicken” and “Chicken Pot Pie”, while appealing, cut corners by calling for pre-made blocks of the stuff. Others like “Smoky Pancetta Cod” require “sachets” of Jamie’s own-brand pre-cooked and pre-flavoured lentils. It’s no feat to think up recipes with 5 ingredients if you’re at this lark!
The book is visually appealing. The recipes do look fantastic and for someone who solely favours snappy cooking it would be a good one to have open on your kitchen counter. As for whether it would suit students – this really comes down to what type of student cook you are. Type 1: a foodie who enjoys cooking new things, or Type 2: kinda just sticks to pasta and easy stuff. If you’re a Type 1 full of foodie passion, are you likely to get excited about over-simplified 5-ingredient recipes? And Type 2s – are you really going to grapple with “Creamy Cooked Mussels” or “Sticky Teriyaki Aubergine” of a post-college evening, even if they do just contain 5 little things?
Jamie’s latest book has failed to impress – but his ever-present ecstatic grin beaming out from the pages will always remain a great selling point.
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