Michele Hewitson: Mucking about in the kitchen

COMMENT

My favourite cooking show on television is that one on just before the news. It is called, I believe, Muck in a Minute and, I also believe, it has been on now for at least 100 years. Oh, it's supposed to be an ad for tins of things, is it?

Never mind. I bet you can't think of anything screening now (or perhaps ever) which has the astonishing ability to showcase the many ways food can be made to look almost like vomit.

Actually, and perhaps oddly for someone who spends a great deal of time in a kitchen and who reads cookbooks with as much pleasure as a good novel, I've decided cooking on the box doesn't work.

It should be even less of a success on the wireless but I do like the cooking slots on Kim Hill's show. What does the woman cook? Listening to her listen to recipes is like listening to someone who has come from a planet where they exist on air. It's wonderfully entertaining stuff. Pork belly? Kim didn't think she liked the sound of it. Perhaps because it rhymes with jelly, she mused.

Righto, we all have our little, really quite rational, foodie prejudices.

My foodie prejudices are against food shows which have become travel jaunts for the hosts. Say what you will about Muck in a Minute, but it's all done in the old-fashioned, boring way: lady stands up on a kitchen set and pretends to cook food.

At least it hasn't gone abroad yet to do its assembling, although it can only be a matter of time. Taste, with Peta Mathias has. Taste Takes Off was in Hawaii last week. You could have been forgiven for wondering where Charlotte Dawson was.

Few other place names, Peta warbled, "conjure up as magic an image to so many". Hawaii, she continued in travel brochure waffle, is the place of "swaying palms" and, wait for it, "swaying music, giant fiery mountains and giant rolling surf". Well, they have to pay all of those sponsors back somehow.

We learned that perhaps the "first Pacific rim dish there ever was" was the disgusting-looking sushi with spam item. How quirky. Mathias, mistress of the "mmm" made no comment on what it tasted like.

I've also got tired of Rick Stein tootling around the English countryside - although you can't accuse him of going abroad, it can only be a matter of time - with that horrible mutt. Last week's hokey tribute song to Chalky, the terrier with a rotten temper, was the final straw.

And when was the last time you cooked something you saw cooked up on a telly show? With Stein the ingredients are only ever given in approximate amounts, so of course you have to rush out and buy the cookbooks. (And very good cookbooks they are too.) So we might as well all stop pretending that it's about cooking.

Which is exactly what cult hit The Iron Chef has done. I saw it on SBS in Aussie and it is completely bonkers and could only have been made in Japan.

"A mix between Godzilla, wrestling, and Julia Child. Yes, it's that strange. And that entertaining," said the Miami Herald.

This is stadium cooking, in which four top chefs are given a stock of supplies, and one theme ingredient. It's a cook-off which pretends to take itself as seriously as the culinary Olympics. There are good chefs and baddie chefs and a commentary which marks every knife cut.

It is glorious good fun and, like those other telly cooking shows, has nothing to do with cooking. I think Kim Hill might like it.