Welcome to my blog!

I love cooking! I love eating! I LOVE FOOD! My point being, if there is a word more powerful than love, then that’s how I feel about food! To me, food incorporates everything that motivates the human specifically love, memory and life.

Through a series of posts, I will be researching cookery books and cooking programmes specifically focusing on factors such as aesthetics, structure and style. I will also be looking at chefs such as Ching He Huang, James Martin, Anthony Bourdain, Tom Kerridge and Nigella Lawson to name a few. The reason for my choosing of these particular chefs is the cultural aspects, being from different countries and making different food, I will be able to compare the presenting styles of each chef. I also love the fact that each of these chefs have made no secret of their love of Literature and how they incorporate this passion of novels into cookery. For instance, Nigella Lawson stating with much difficulty that one of her favourite novels is Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield.

Recently, I was watching Nigellissima with my mum, and I was saying how much I admired every single detail of the show, from the colour of Nigella’s outfit to the beauty of the camera movement. Much to my annoyance, my mum destroyed my dreams by saying that each of these actions were perfectly staged by paid creative directors who coordinate these beautiful ‘natural’ movements. I really wanted to believe that those carefully positioned twinkly lights were reflecting off the shiny metal of Nigella’s food mixer spontaneously. 

On the contrary to my mum’s statement, Nigella maintains the view that her show is “not scripted and (I) feel it's virtually impossible to be anything but yourself when you're in front of the cameras and cooking so there is a measure of truth in what you see.” To an extent I believe this, however I feel that there are some staged parts of the show that are added to attract and seduce the audience.

I’d have to say that I much prefer cooking shows to cookery books being that they are real people that incorporate feeling, emotion and memory into their recipes. To me, this makes for a successful show, for instance when Tom Kerridge mentions making slow-cooked apple-glazed ribs for friends, the social aspect of cooking and eating together is appealing for all audiences who may want to do the same.

As seen below, these are a few of my many treasured recipe books.

Throughout the next few blogs, I wanted to discuss a few things, including:

• The presenting style of my favourite chefs
• The aesthetics and somewhat glamour of cooking shows
• The beauty of language and how language is the perfect partner for food

In my next blog, I will be discussing one of my favourite TV Chefs, Nigella Lawson.