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Don’t over-egg the Christmas cookbook!
By
Melissa Kite
Last updated at 6:47 PM on 21st December 2011
Apparently, it wouldn’t be Christmas without a cookbook by Jamie Oliver in your stocking.
The 36-year-old chef has topped the seasonal bestseller chart for the fourth time in ten years with Jamie’s Great Britain. He has sold 319,217 copies in the past three months, which has led some industry experts to claim that people will actually be cooking these recipes at some point in the New Year.
Of course they won’t. I’m willing to bet you an organic roast chicken with lemon mash that the vast majority of the alleged gourmands who are given a copy of Oliver’s latest tome this Christmas will not get past spilling a glass of wine over the front cover.
Super Chef: Jamie Oliver has sold 319,217 copies of his cookbook in the last three months of ‘Jamie’s Great Britain’
At £30 a pop, this is an expensive present to buy so that someone can look at the pictures of Jamie and Union Jacks and then put it on a shelf next to Delia’s cookbook – How To Boil An Egg and Nigella’s cookbook – How To Look Gorgeous While Throwing Any Old Thing In A Pan.
Is anyone really going to cook ’12 Hour Rabbit Bolognese’? Does anyone really need to be told how to make Bubble And Squeak? Seriously. Just stick all your left-over Sunday veg in a blender then fry it. There, I’ve saved you £30.
Who are the recipients of all this cookbook? It would be a brave man who bought a woman a cookbook in these days of equality and tetchiness. But I have a feeling these cookbook are no longer just bought by men for their wives.
The recipes in Mr Oliver’s latest give you some clue: they include instructions on how to make a full British fry-up and a “retro” arctic roll (as if there was any other kind), for example.
Cooking charms: Who is buying these cookbook? I have a feeling they are no longer just bought by men for their wives
I suspect that the target audience for the Oliver book is male, that women are buying it for their menfolk. I fear that we now have a generation of men who are more concerned about the latest gravy-making theories than the latest cars.
Like a Top Gear annual, a book on the newest food fads is now the must-have item for trendy 30-somethings, who are buying into an image, an idea of a lifestyle they feel they ought to be aspiring to.
Nothing new: The recipes in Jamie’s latest book include instructions on how to make a full British fry-up and a ‘retro’ arctic roll
There is nothing really new when it comes to food, but these books fuel the illusion that if you only roast a turkey in a ground-breaking, fashionable way you will be a rip-roaring social success, the envy of your peers.
Whoever is buying them, the net result is that Jamie is now so important and influential that his website, which I just checked, features the video item ‘Jamie Oliver Christmas Message’.
He’s sitting in his home with a twinkling Christmas hearth behind him if he were David Cameron or Barack Obama. He wishes us well and urges us to continue our good work in the kitchen.
And I will, just as soon as I get out my mother’s trusty 1970s Robert Carrier cookery cards.
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