If ever my near-neighbour William Sitwell is killed in a bizarre shooting accident and I end up taking his place as one of the guest critics on MasterChef: the Professionals (not likely, I admit, but you never know), here are some tips for competitors who wish to avoid a stinking review.
1. Don’t serve me salmon. Salmon is the fish of the devil, which is why Satan coloured it that particularly vile shade of pink. It is evil because it is almost certainly farmed and therefore pumped full of antibiotics to destroy all the parasites with which it would otherwise be pullulating. If it’s not farmed, well, it still tastes of salmon, doesn’t it?
2. Don’t serve me anything cooked sous-vide. Yeah, maybe to you chefs it looks all cutting-edge and technical. But to me it looks like food half-cooked in a plastic bag. Anyway, like hipster facial hair, it’s so three years ago,
3. Serve me foie gras.
So that’s me sorted. Now all you need to think about is Monica, Marcus and Gregg. Gregg is the easy one. If in doubt, just make him an enormous portion of sticky toffee spotted dick with lashings of custard, honey, treacle and lard, on a buttery biscuit base dotted with whelks and jellied eel that will take him right back to his luvly jubbly honest cockney roots. Then see him smile.
Monica is trickier, especially her infamous skills test. So here’s my advice: take a year out and dedicate each day to cleaning and butchering different animals — snails, frogs, pugs (they haven’t come up yet, so you could be on to a winner there), wildebeests (ditto) and perhaps most especially the deadly pufferfish they call fugu. You’ve got to think clever here: with MasterChef and its variations in their gazillionth series, the makers are going to resort to increasingly desperate ways to keep the viewing figures up.
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