‘The most egregious culinary scam of all’

For well over a decade, the Golden Spurtle World Porridge Making Championships have been held in Carrbridge, Scotland. The winner, as you might expect, goes home with a Golden Spurtle trophy.

This year, it was Lisa Williams from Suffolk who carried it off. The Evening Express called her the Rick Stein of porridge and featured a photograph of her holding her spurtle. “I can’t put into words how delighted I am,” Lisa said, touchingly. It’s not the sort of pleasure it would be easy for anyone to find words for.

Credit: Simon Letch

The judges of this year’s Specialty award at the championships were left similarly speechless. The winning dish in this category was porridge noodles laced with “hand-dived seared scallops”. It was at this point that Barry Humphries’ views on lobster flashed through my mind. Lobster appears in Humphries’ famous list of overrated things, along with the Caribbean and Pilates. He also described the Bible as “not very easy to finish, or very easy to start”.

Some things you simply detest with a passion (Baby On Board stickers, in my case, or stonefish) but the overrated belong to an entirely separate category. There’s a whiff of not just madness but chicanery about the hyping of certain things and certain talents: lobster, obviously, but also 8 Out of 10 Cats and Samuel Beckett. Lobster sends signals about social status, reassuring diners, as champagne does, that this moment is not just expensive, but special, while not actually tasting of anything much at all – stale tofu perhaps, but that might just be me. Nor should it feel obliged to, of course. That’s not why it’s there.

The list of things that leave you unmoved, while thrilling millions and enriching a select few, will be revealing. You don’t understand the hype around Andy Warhol, marriage, The Phantom of the Opera or climbing mountains in the dark in foreign parts to watch the sun rise? I doubt anyone does, but they all make certain people lots of money, from art dealers to guides in Sumatra. You don’t give a damn who wins the Melbourne Cup (or the Ashes or the grand final)? Shout it – and you’ll experience a kind of ecstatic release from the chains of accepted taste.

However, at the top of my list of what’s vastly overrated is food: eating, cooking, chefs, recipe books … food, in general. It’s not just friands, either. Outside of Paddington or South Yarra, who would willingly put a friand in their mouth? Or a bagel, for that matter? A bagel tastes the way you’d expect flour, water and, on high holidays, a squirt of egg to taste: dry and disagreeable. So what’s all the fuss about?

It’s patriotic cuisine that takes the cake. If Icelanders believe that rotten shark meat is the beating heart of their culture, who could object? If your national identity is founded on dumplings, please, eat dumplings twice a day. But for the rest of us, fermented shark flesh and dumplings are vastly overrated. As the British writer Will Self once put it with disarming directness, food is just shit waiting to happen. He was overstating his case, but essentially on target. Yet life’s culinary sideshow has been turned into a quasi-religious extravaganza.

It has been well established by British scientists that the average Briton, if blindfolded, can’t tell the difference between a glass of Veuve Clicquot and a plate of egg and chips. Are we any different? Yet every night the airwaves are saturated with celebrity chefs rhapsodising over the elk in sizzling jus that they’ve just slid out of the oven. The Moroccan pomegranates in orange-flower water with cloves, the sleek superstar in the spotless kitchen assures us, are to die for.

Anyone who tastes these concoctions in front of the camera will murmur “Mmmmm” as the first morsel hits the palate. There are, after all, so few English words for a pleasant sensation in the mouth, so few ever having been needed. There aren’t many polite French or Russian ejaculations you’d use in a social situation, either. It’s just food, after all – just a kind of mush. Not Beethoven, not Freddie Mercury singing “Mama”, not your first glimpse of Kilimanjaro, not a funeral in Westminster Abbey.

Certain celebrity chefs such as Nigella Lawson are memorable, naturally, but it’s her play-acting and the naughtiness we delight in. Who cares what she cooks?

The most egregious culinary scam of all, however, is undoubtedly pasta. Across the globe, from Tierra del Fuego to Tajikistan, whole populations have been brainwashed into thinking pasta is delicious. Here’s the latest on pasta: it’s just flour, water and egg, like bagels without the crispy, tasty bits. That’s it. Pasta-lovers will tell you it’s just the base for tastier accompaniments. Well, just eat those, then.

We might have to do our snook-cocking in private. Our opinion of Kylie Minogue’s talents or Spicks and Specks will be of little interest to anyone else. We’re not Barry Humphries. Still, opening up our days to enjoying what we really value and love can be a liberating act of defiance.

Robert Dessaix’s collection of essays, Abracadabra (Brio Books; $35), was published in April.

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