Here’s Jamie Oliver, setting out to change the world. Again. Or, as he puts
it: having sorted out school dinners, he now wants to alter “the face of
eating in Britain”. With a three-pronged approach.
No, not the Naked this or the Happy Days that, or even Lovely Jubbly the
other. His new vehicle is the Ministry of Food, named after the wartime
government institution that tried to get us all to cook our greens properly.
There’s a Ministry recipe book coming out and a Ministry TV show – so far, so
familiar. But this time Jamie is going further: he wants us all to preach
the gospel of the new Ministry. Grab a Jamie Oliver recipe and “pass it on”
is his current mantra.
So that I fully understand, he’s decided to pass one on to me. And so here I
am, knocking up a chicken korma with the cheeky chappie in the studio
kitchen at his east London HQ. Forty people are beavering around us on
computers, but Jamie and I are by the stove, chopping up ginger. An
underrated spice, he says.
“I don’t know what your knife skills are like,” he says pleasantly. I hover
nervously, big knife in hand, over a thumb of ginger. “Rock it – rock the
knife as you chop,” he says.
As ever, he is casually unkempt, quite the young British millionaire in
expensive Fila zipped top and sneakers. This is a man who has so many
missions, not to mention empires – restaurants, books, TV projects, a
cooking school – that you wonder if he has time to do anything other than
sleep.
Plus a newly pregnant wife, Jools (snapped last weekend walking imperiously
beside Jamie, who was toting at least four bulging carriers), and two
daughters, Poppy Honey, 6, and Daisy Boo, 5, who attend a private girls’
school in north London and have been spotted chilling out at Buckingham
Palace garden parties.
All of which may explain why 33-year-old Oliver is looking pale with fatigue.
Nevertheless, he doesn’t forget the mockney chitchat as we’re a-choppin’ and
a-rockin’, and even throws a chummy arm around me as we slave, not very
hard, over a hot stove.
I’m handed an onion, and throw in a flash trick – chopping it into downward
slices and then sneaking in a long horizontal slash so that the onion is
instantly bisected. I do hope Jamie’s noticed. I want him to like me,
because he’s a likable bloke. That’s his selling point, as well as the fact
that he describes cooking in the most touchy-feely, accessible and
contagious manner possible. Even more than Nigella. Jamie just wants you to
love cooking – to feel that cabbage, to have a slurp of that custard, to
flip that pancake.
His latest idea is that you learn a recipe, an easy one like our korma, (which
he sums up as “an assembly job, and then a decanting job”), and then pass it
on to someone else. The catalyst behind this evangelism? Recently, he
realised that most of us have no idea about cooking. We can’t fry an egg. We
can’t boil an egg. Hell, we can’t even boil water for the egg. We are all
going to Obesity Island in a reinforced rowing boat because we can’t feed
ourselves properly.
It’s certainly true that, for all Jamie’s popularity – and £25m empire – few
of his readers are busily whipping up his recipes. We use his books for
coffee-table decoration. Or bedtime reading. Or doorstops. We don’t
necessarily cook with them.
Jamie knows that because he’s been filming in Rotherham, that Yorkshire mining
town where irate mothers passed burgers through the school railings after
Turkey Twiz-zlers were banned from every school dining room in the nation –
thanks to Jamie’s school-dinner show, in which he exposed the lack of taste
and proper nutrition in most school dinners. The Rotherham mums later
claimed they were shovelling in tuna sandwiches (yeah, and Ryvita), but
nevertheless, Rotherham became a byword for a populace that existed
exclusively on food-stuffs whose most recent provenance was a polystyrene
box.
Armed with missionary zeal, plus the obligatory TV crew, Jamie met people who
had never peeled a carrot, and tried to convince them to dump the kebabs. By
the end of programme one, a woman who has never boiled a pan of water is
cooking flash-fried salmon for 100 people. Not quite the feeding of the
5,000, but nearly.
Indeed, Jamie’s disciples have pledged to carry on the Word after his
departure. These include a man in his eighties, a single mum and a
bricklayer. And that’s the whole point.
“Every crap cook can cook this curry,” he says, as I tip in a tin of coconut
milk. “My class had no confidence. And they had never seen cooking, ever, in
their life. (Chop up the chicken, my love.) If one person teaches four other
people, and that continues for 13 times only, that’s the population of Great
Britain.”
We share a quiet moment, focusing on this startling fact. Then it’s back to
the stirring and I’m offered a spoonful of korma. “I would never lie to you
and say this is going to be the best curry you’ve ever had, but I can
guarantee it will be tasty and it works,” he says.
Doesn’t this latest venture somewhat backfire on all his previous efforts?
After all, he’s been teaching us to cook for a decade – and now he tells us
we can’t even boil an egg. Frankly, we might have been better off watching
Big Cook Little Cook on CBeebies.
“I know that’s what you feel,” he says, refusing to take offence, “that there
are so many books, so many cook shows out there. But if you’re not engaged
with food, you don’t see the cook shows. You don’t see the recipes in the
magazines. You don’t f****** see them. (Let that rice steam – it will be
absolutely spot on.)”
He may not be able to persuade all the unenlightened to part with £25 for a
cookbook or even to watch his TV series, but presumably that’s where “pass
it on” comes in. He shrugs and sprinkles almonds into the saucepan. “I have
some information that some people, by the looks of it, don’t have. And I
feel that it’s my job – why I feel that way, I don’t f****** know – to show
them how to turn on a pan of water.”
Oliver clearly enjoys being a missionary in the kitchen. If you can’t make
lasagne, he feels compelled to tell you how to do it. I mention that I have
a downer on the dish, and he’s off: “Single cream, chopped anchovy, grated
parmesan, chopped rosemary, a little nutmeg,” he says, almost marching me
out of the door to source some pasta sheets. “Takes 30 seconds. And none of
that f****** roux white sauce!”
What drives him? Why does Jamie Oliver, with his lovely lifestyle and his mega
career, exhaust himself trying to reach people who patently don’t care what
they put in their mouths? “I force myself to do it,” he says. “I know I’ve
put myself at the mercy of the public, feeling uncomfortable and more
vulnerable than all the other celebrity chefs put together. (Tear that
coriander up. Now sprinkle it from a height – not to be poncy, but because
if you do that, it goes everywhere, which is good.)”
So I’m tearing and sprinkling as Jamie continues to ruminate: “People have
been let down. If you have 30 years, during which time both parents have to
go out to work, you’ll end up with young mothers who have never been shown
how to cook at home, never been shown how to cook at school, basically
buying into the only solution they know – which is to spend £100 a week on
shit.
“I think TV can tick a lot of boxes but there’s nothing that can replace skin
on skin, mums and their children, and cooking in schools.”
What does he think about Ed Balls’s recent announcement of a £150m fund to
ensure every secondary school has cooking lessons back on the syllabus by
2011?
“It’s better than what we had before. Will it make all the differ-ence? No.
It’s not enough. A lot of school kitchens are falling down out there, and
that money isn’t going to necessarily touch the sides.”
He produces a copy of the new Ed Balls-endorsed free school cookbook
(available on www.dcsf.gov.uk/ publications), which is being offered to
every 11-year-old in Britain, and sniffs contemptuously. “The cookbook that
every child will get. I have red stickers all over mine, put there in anger
and shock.”
I take a look. It’s full of uninspiring recipes such as “Roast chicken legs.
Ingredients: two chicken legs”. Not very lovely jubbly.
“It’s implying it’s something that it’s not,” he says. In other words, hardly
likely to inspire a new generation to cook. He’s passionate about that,
feeling that there are already “three lost generations” with no cooking
skills at all.
“There needs to be a f****** master plan, with something central,” says
Oliver. Like the Ministry of Food?
“Possibly. The government has said that every primary school child should be
taught to cook – but I already know that primary schools won’t be given
facilities to do this, and that Ofsted won’t be regulating or checking up on
what they’re doing. Teachers won’t be taught or trained how to do the
cooking [classes]. And also there is no syllabus. So is it all lip-service?
Are they actually going to do cooking in primary schools?”
That’s Ed Balls put back in his box. Meanwhile, Jamie Oliver is already
bracing himself for critical reaction to his own latest project.
“Will people say this is a vanity project?” he asks rhetorically, knowing the
answer. I mention that it wouldn’t be the first time he’s felt a critic’s
knife. “Yeah, another one,” he mutters. (“Now, make a well in that and pour
the curry into it. Go easy. People hurl food onto their plates, and I think,
f*** me.”) He truly does love food. He doesn’t go all snobby about taking
shortcuts; during our cookery lesson, he lav-ishes praise on Patak’s curry
paste, “and I’m not paid to promote it, or have anything to do with it”.
Unlike Sainsbury’s, which he promotes in return for a million-plus pay
cheque.
Talk of money makes him uneasy, as though he’s ashamed of making too much, too
young. “No one goes into cooking for a millionaire lifestyle. My dad [who
ran a pub in Clavering, Essex] is very comfortable now, but he was skint
when I was growing up. Every pound he earned was a hard one.
“Then I had this strange moment – and within years, the public decides my
future. My first book went to No 4 in the charts before the first programme
even came out, and I got rich very quickly. I had always been brought up to
be very embarrassed by [money], and Dad always said never talk about it.”
Hence the charity projects, and the missionary zeal. Guilt and self-belief.
It’s a strange rocket fuel, but it works for Jamie.
Our curry is cooked. “Have a little taste of that,” he says. “It should be as
good as anything you’ve bought as a takeaway. If not better.”
It’s divine. He summons a minion to his side. “Get Rosie a bag.” Oh, goody – a
takeaway: that’s supper sorted. Actually, no. What I get is a large bag full
of raw chicken. Plus an onion, some curry paste and a tin of coconut milk.
“Pass it on”, you see. Start a chicken korma virus and hope it gets around the
nation. “Contrary to random pieces of incorrect stuff which have appeared
about me in the papers,” says Jamie, who is clearly a bit more thin-skinned
than he seems, “I am a great believer in the British public. Pass it on
means your little bit of effort makes a difference.
“That,” he concludes, dressing the curry with lettuce and a dollop of yoghurt,
“is a bloody lovely dinner. Tuck in.”
Afterwards, I go home and cook the recipe for my children. They say it’s the
nicest thing I’ve ever made.
Jamie’s Ministry of Food begins on Channel 4 on Tuesday at 9pm
