establishing the appearance of familiarity with the careers and backgrounds of living writers and professional chefs bearing well-known names, have compileda list they call the Foodies’ Who’s Who. I take it they didn’t want to ask the persons concerned. It’s time-consuming to obtain facts. Why bother when you can invent? So in the only really funny phrase in the whole of their facetious guide to food snobbery they disclaim responsibility for ‘any variance of fact from that recorded in good faith’. Variance of fact? Good faith? I’d like to hear a legal definition of a fact variant. And, in the context, of good faith. Oh well, 1984 was the year of Newspeak. Have a nice variant for 1985.
Sorry I had to mention myself. Over now to Paul Levy and the Dorchester dinner last October for the launch of Foodie . ‘I am a chronicler,’ confided Levy to Joe Hyam, editor of the trade weekly Caterer and Hotelkeeper , ‘the Boswell rather than the Dr Johnson of the Foodies.’ Well, Dr Johnson he ain’t. But Boswell? Hang on there. ‘An eighteenth-century parasite… passionately interested in himself… used others as his mirrors… an opportunist and a snobbish opportunist at that.’ Sorry Mr Levy. That’s how Sean Day Lewis described Boswell in November last when the BBC presented a programme called Boswell’s London Journal . It does indeed seem to me that in Foodie there’s more than a little of the mirror image of Paul Levy, whose aspirations, if not his achievements, appear all ways Foodie. As for Miss Barr’s editorial snobberies, I’m sure she would agree that they are nothing if not opportunist. After all, as deputy editor of Harpers & Queen it’s her business to sell her archi-snob magazine. Foodie is a sales ploy. In conception quite a clever one, but her foodist Boswell lacks both the detachment and the style requisite to carry it through. The fond mirror reflections keep getting in the way.
Leaving aside the detachment deficiency, have a look at the style. Here comes the Magimix, page 30 . ‘Suddenly, in the early seventies, the whole monstrous heap of meunière was seen to have been fertilising the soil for new plants of every kind.’ Ouch. Our Boswell, describing the old-fashioned puréeing, whisking and mincing demanded by the nouvelle cuisine, is of the opinion that it was only the advent of the food processor that enabled home cooks to adapt the style from the restaurants. But without food processors there wouldn’t have been nouvelle cuisine in the first place, or at any rate not the one we’ve got, and anyway food processors of one kind and another were around long before the household Magimix explosion. Now skip two paragraphs and proceed to page 31 . ‘Suddenly the whole monstrous heap of business lunches was seen to have been fertilising a dead idea.’Oh help. Change the needle. Cram that heaving heap of compost back into the processor. All right, the word processor if you like, and re-extrude it as a great big beautiful crunchy puff for, you’ve guessed, Harpers & Queen . The magazine, its advertising people say, is read by more men – oh, them – than ‘ Vogue, House & Garden, Punch , and the colour supplements’. Chuck it, psoodies. Back with you to your Bombay Brasserie tiffins and your Dorchester foodscapes laid out on white octagonal plates – the shape helps the chefs align the foie gras parfait with the tomato-skin rosebuds, you know – lay down your editorial pens, go reactivate your gelato chefs and your pasta mastas, and in between bouts of wild-mushroom spotting and headhunting in Foodieland you might every now and again spare time for a glance at Dean Swift’s furiously ironic Modest Proposal concerning the feeding of the half-starved Irish peasantry of his day.
The point is that an examination of the fads and foibles of a consumer-crazed society, its preoccupation with the glamour-invested personalities of the classy professional chefs and their food and the
Heidi Hunter, Bad Boy Team