Cooking really shouldn’t make good radio. On television, it’s already frustrating that you can’t taste what you’re seeing, but on radio you can’t even see it. ‘I’m just cracking an egg,’ they tell you. ‘And now I’ll crack another egg.’ The sounds — violent thuds, hissing gas, moist chewing — are more ominous than appetising and the commentary (‘I’m just mixing those eggs together now’) can’t help but be comically sedate (‘OK — they’re mixed’).
So it’s a miracle that The Food Programme (Radio 4), after three decades of this sort of experiment, is as good as it often is, and Cooking for Poldark, this week’s ingenious episode, was really very good indeed.
Its likeable star was Genevieve Taylor, a ‘food stylist’ who constructs banquets for the BBC1 adaptation, now on its second series, of Winston Graham’s Poldark novels. If you haven’t seen it or read them, Ross Poldark’s world is 18th-century Cornwall, and the dialogue sounds like this: ‘Damn me nostrils! What’s that I scent? Swan? Partridge?’
Aidan Turner’s topless scything wasn’t on the agenda. The only torso under scrutiny belonged to a metre-long suckling pig that arrived on set, slightly disintegrating, in the back seat of the butcher’s car, wearing a seat belt. ‘I love it!’ said Taylor. ‘It’s got crispy little ears.’
Taylor’s brief was to cater banquets ‘as sumptuous and luxurious as possible’ with ‘touches of gold’ so that they glittered in candlelight. She had never cooked for a period set before, but she was very game. ‘I think this is called a sucket fork,’ she said, in her kitchen at home, as she poached sweetmeats in a loudly bubbling pot.
On-air cooking needs some comedy element, and Taylor’s had the spice of arcane vocabulary and the sheer silliness of the 18th-century cuisine she was trying to recreate.
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