Did you have a good Christmas lunch? Or did someone undercook the turkey? Overcook the sprouts? Burn the pudding? Don’t worry, there is a government minister and an armful of research on your side. I kid you not: you may have fallen victim yesterday to the wrong “smog formula” – and here’s how.

Ministers have been commissioning research into how easy recipes are to understand. And through something called a smog (simplified measure of gobbledegook) formula they have learnt that recipes from male chefs are easier to read and follow than those written by female ones. In case you think this just a bit of rubbish made up to fill space on Boxing Day, a sort of festive Times stocking filler with a tenuous link to Christmas, you’re wrong – well, partly wrong. It is a festive space filler with a tenuous link to Christmas, obviously, but that doesn’t mean I’ve actually invented it.

When I first heard about this research I thought it must be a joke: why would the Government be doing the sort of work even a paranoid cookbook publisher would probably balk at, and at our cost? But there was a government minister issuing a quote: “No one need be deprived of enjoying Delia Smith’s bubble and squeak or Nigella’s chocolate fudge cake. If you find it hard to follow a recipe from a celebrity chef, why not call . . .” And there followed a “skills for life reading and numeracy assessment”: I had stumbled across new Labour’s let-them-eat-cake moment.

If you were illiterate or innumerate, do you think there might be more pressing concerns than learning how to read celebrity recipes? Like learning to read a bus timetable or a gas bill or a letter from your child’s school? None of us are strangers to pointless official exercises in spending money (I remember being told recently in quick succession on the radio on a Sunday afternoon to be careful at level crossings, not to smoke and not to smuggle meat and dairy products into the country from outside the EU), but the celebrity chefs research seemed to me to take the biscuit – if not, apparently, Nigella’s chocolate fudge cake.

The research was commissioned by the new Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, or “Dius”, which has been cobbled together from the bits of the old Education Department that Gordon Brown’s henchman, Ed Balls, didn’t want in the Children, Schools and Families super-department created for him by Mr Brown in June.

Dius exists to get more people into higher education, and to broaden Britain’s research base. Naturally, as is the wont of any state department, it sees its purpose as something higher than that: mission creep is evident even from the Dius mission statement, part of which reads: “Build social and community cohesion through improved social justice, civic participation and economic opportunity by raising aspirations and broadening participation, progression and achievement in learning and skills.”

That’s pretty all-encompassing, gobble-gobble, and neatly encapsulates one of my firm rules of politics – if it can’t state briefly what its point is, it’s because it doesn’t know. (Another rule, if you’re interested: the faster a man walks, the less important he is. It only applies to men.) So, anyway, there is this new department, Dius, and in it are five ministers. I’m not sure what any of them do; when I checked, one had just launched a report on intelligent fridges, that kind of stuff. One of them is the strangely titled Parliamentary UnderSecretary of State for Intellectual Property and Quality (quality of what?). It makes the Labour Party easier to govern if as many MPs as possible are on the government pay roll. Gobble-gobble.

Clearly there isn’t enough for them all to do, so they have to invent things. And the burning (God forbid) issue of Nigella’s chocolate cake falls under the remit of another minister at Dius, the “Parliamentary UnderSecretary of State for Skills”, David Lammy. In an apparently not-idle-enough moment, he seems to have commissioned the research into celebrity chefs. Pages and pages of it spewed forth: no fewer than thirty-five recipes by five celebrity chefs were analysed by layout, presentation, font and type size, “readability” and “the motivation of the reader”, and the results published this autumn along with some cooking tips from the department: “If you are preparing a family roast you will need to work out the cooking time carefully . . .”

Here we come to the smog formula, which suggests, said the research, “that words of three syllables are more difficult to read”. They needed a formula to tell them that? “Most of these recipes contain many long words such as immediately, consistency and translucent, yet the readability of the sentences is generally not affected, because of the familiarity of the other everyday words in the sentence.” You don’t mean they pad them out with fancy words, do you?

“Difficult words in the sentences tend to be unusual ingredients, verbs eg sprinkling and simmering or adjectives eg golden brown, smooth, creamy and blackened glaze” (their punctuation, not mine. They’re teaching people to read here, remember, not write). You can probably guess what the smog formula thinks of “Gorgonzola” or “baking parchment”.

Result? The easiest recipe to follow was Nigella Lawson’s South Beach Black Bean Soup, and the overall winner was Nigel Slater. Losers? Gordon Ramsay’s Roast Rump of Lamb with Herb Couscous, Nigella’s Slow-Roasted Aromatic Shoulder of Pork and Delia Smith’s – surely not Delia – Chocolate, Prune and Armagnac Cake. A-gobble-gobble-gobble they go: and a happy Boxing Day from another government turkey.

Alice Miles won the What the Papers Say Columnist of the Year award last week

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