When did we decide making food should be stressful? I believe it was around 2009, when MasterChef Australia took off, with its explosions and tears and plate-throwing; of course we ruthlessly exported it, like the Hemsworths.
Along the way, cooking went from being an act of service to an extreme sport. As a result, you can now watch people shout and cry as they decorate a mille-feuille on most of the streamers. Cooking is now a form of combat – there are Cake Wars, Cupcake Wars and Culinary Class Wars – and frequently, pure spectacle. You can make a cake that looks like a lifesize Superman (ahem, Super Mega Cakes) – but, as I said out loud while watching two contestants have a fight about time management, when is someone going to fucking eat something?
Most new cooking shows are not really about food at all, but drama. In my mind, the best are made by people who don’t really want to be on TV – so out with wannabe reality types and, as much I believe both Jamie and Nigella genuinely love food, there is something gratingly artificial about his puppyish enthusiasm and her seductive verbosity, so out with them too. I much prefer the passionate, quiet, awkward types who get roped into doing telly: think Nigel Slater, Simon Hopkinson, Julia Child, Adam Liaw, Kylie Kwong or Nadiya Hussain.
And – of course – The Cook and the Chef. It is a 20-year-old show that looks about 40. It was an ABC show, but these days it serves as punctuation for SBS Food to break up 300 episodes of The Cook Up. God, I love it. It helps that it was filmed on my native soil, in South Australia. It was a balm whenever I felt homesick 16,000km away in London – and it still is, 800km away in Melbourne. But mostly I just love it for being all about the pleasures of cooking.
Maggie Beer, the cook, would make the pragmatic, homey dishes: she’d bung a chook in the oven or plop down a generous pavlova, and always served up on kitschy farmhouse crockery. (And verjuice, always verjuice.) Simon Bryant, the chef, ran a hotel kitchen in Adelaide and always dressed in blacks. He had more unconventional tastes: his chicken kiev, for instance, was stuffed with butter and marmalade, then wrapped in caul fat. And he wouldn’t just serve – he’d plate up an artful pile of greens, an elegant line of sauce and a tea towel slung over his shoulder to tidy it all up.
I suspect they were initially paired in opposition to one another – the country cook versus the hardened pro – but perhaps due to their natural temperaments, they ended up as a lovingly odd couple. He was messy, she was messier. He drizzled, she glugged. He loved chilli; she couldn’t bear it. Neither of them liked making desserts. (“I hate following recipes,” Maggie said by way of explanation.) She frequently forgot to put things in the oven and always apologised for her presentation. “Nonsense, Maggie,” he’d always reply.
The Cook and the Chef was made when most Anglo Australians didn’t know what freekeh or verjuice was, or how to handle an eggplant. Their dishes were indulgent but mostly unfussy; the ingredients seemed to come straight from sun-drenched vegetable gardens and orchards around Beer’s territory, the Barossa. (It is the best advertisement South Australia has ever had.) These two could convert a puritan to the earthly pleasures of a ripe fig, a tomato on the vine, a great balsamic. They were often giggly, giddy with happiness.
The Cook and the Chef remains wonderfully instructional. It has taught me how to make good scrambled eggs (fold, don’t scramble – and leave them a lot runnier than you think); how to pick a passionfruit (wrinklier means sweeter); and to stop putting strawberries in the fridge (arrange them side by side on a flat dish so they don’t go mouldy). But it also serves as a delightful palate cleanser if you’ve had enough of people sweating and swearing over food, or celebrity chefs performing versions of themselves.
Pleasingly, SBS’s scatter-gun late airings seem to have a following among the internet’s night owls. A tangential thought: can someone please do a club remix of the banging theme song?
The Cook and the Chef is available to stream on SBS on Demand and ABC iView in Australia. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
