HOLIDAYING this week in my beloved little corner of north Cornwall, my mind turned to the rise of the cult of the celebrity chef.

Idling away my time enjoying the stunning view of the Camel estuary from the holiday let’s suntrap terrace perched high above Padstow, I reflected how the fame of one such chef in particular, Rick Stein, had changed the town.

It was the daddy of them all, Keith Floyd, who featured Stein in one of his own shows and unwittingly handed over the reins to his friend and fellow Cornish restaurateur. The rest, as they say, is cooking history.

The popularity of both men has since spawned a plethora of celebrity chefs and cooking programmes to dominate television schedules week in, week out, vying for air time with the diatribe of reality television that masquerades as entertainment.

The great man himself is back in the news. He died on Monday, coincidentally in the week that he was being dragged out of obscurity by a national newspaper and another famed drinker and party animal, the actor Keith Allen. The reappearance of Floyd brought back memories of his culinary prowess and wonderful recipes, which were so often prepared in a haze of the fruits of the vine.

Celebrity chefs are no longer content to simply cook; instead, they have assumed the adventurous mantle of explorers, travelling the world accompanied by a film crew in search of national cuisine to inspire menus for their lucrative television series and the spin-off best-selling cookbook. And let’s not forget the increased bookings at their restaurants.

As well as earning pot-loads of cash and royalties, they can do good – as Stein did when championing British food heroes, in the process doing more for hard-working independent producers – including those he featured in the Channel Islands – than anyone before or since.

Likewise, Old Etonian Hugh Double-Barrel and the chirpy chappie himself, Jamie Oliver, have made us all sit up and think about where our food comes from by revealing the pitiful conditions of factory farming and animal welfare issues that surround the drive for cheap food at the lowest price.

Both have resorted to extreme examples to get their messages across, such as Oliver orchestrating the gassing of chicks live on television and slaughtering a sheep by cutting its throat.

How Fanny Cradock and the henpecked Johnnie must be spinning in their graves.
Good old Floyd would never have resorted to such drastic action, although he would have been game to join a gaggle of his fellows in a chefs’ version of the Full Monty striptease performed not once, but twice, live on air for Children in Need.

It was the celebrity of Ricky Stein, his passion for fresh seafood simply cooked, and his love of Cornwall that first took me to Padstow, to dine and stay in his famous Seafood Restaurant. Since then his empire has grown to include an upmarket gift shop, bakery, delicatessen, seafood school, fishmonger’s, butcher’s and a fish and chip shop. He has also acquired a pub and will soon be opening a new restaurant in Falmouth.

There are those who frequently get his goat (yours truly included when I interviewed him for a travel feature) by referring to the delightful port on the Camel estuary as Padstein.

Yet love him or loathe him and what Padstow has become, his business acumen has boosted the local economy, not only by creating jobs for local people but also by drawing in tens of thousands of people each year.

Celebrity chefs leaving their kitchens to star in television programmes is OK as long as, like Stein, Hugh the Old Etonian and the Hairy Bikers, they do so by showing us the origins of the dishes they rustle up as they travel through delightful locations.

The downside of celebrity cooking comes in the seductive presentation skills of the voluptuous Nigella and Gordon Ramsay’s over-usage of Anglo-Saxon expletives. His interventions in dodgy kitchens in the UK and Stateside are becoming repetitive; moreover, his habit of bobbing up and down in excitement as he chatters away is becoming as annoying as the endless flow of four-letter words.

The celebrity chef genre recently took a bizarre turn as producers began to run out of original ideas, as exemplified by the activities of Jamie Oliver and Antony Worrall Thompson. The chirpy Essex boy and modern father role model has metamorphosised into a social anthropologist as he travels around America patronising the locals at every opportunity.

Hanging out with reformed drug addicts and street gangs in the Hispanic ghettos of Los Angeles, he was so overwhelmed by their heartbreaking stories that he simply had to cater for a christening party!

Hello, but when did being a dab-hand at making pastry make him a social worker? Ridding the world of the turkey twizzler was a masterstroke, but taking asparagus on a cattle drive in an attempt to add variety to the diet of saddle-hardened cowboys went down like a lead balloon.

The world of celebrity cheffing went further downhill a fortnight ago when Worrall Thompson was asked to rustle up a banquet from food scavenged by ‘freegans’ from supermarket dustbins. Whatever, at this low point, I found myself crying, happened to TV classics such as Brideshead Revisited, A Passage to India, sitcoms of the quality of Only Fools and Horses and the Likely Lads or Alan Bleasdale’s hard-hitting and thought-provoking drama The Boys from the Blackstuff?

What can we expect next? Masterchef plucking the homeless from the streets to whip up two courses in an hour? Or the most irritating celebrity chef of them all, Ainsley Harriott, floating weightlessly while cooking lunch for the crew of the Shuttle as it orbits the earth?

How about Hugh and Jamie taking reality television literally by escorting primary school children through the animal slaughter process from farmyard to supermarket shelf? The only problem is should such a horrendous story be screened before or after the 9 pm watershed?

Skilled chefs are masters of their craft. They do not just cook food; they create a masterpiece on a plate. There was a time when all a good chef needed were the right ingredients and the ideal location to practise his or her skills. Now they need a gimmick, an ego the size of a small planet and an agent. Cooking doesn’t get tougher than this!