Learning to cook – my parents were youngish, and brokish. So I learned to cook tuna mornay, sausages, ‘casserole of what’s in the fridge’, ‘potato cakes made of leftovers and an egg’, mince and lamb chops (remember when they were cheap?).

Still, as someone else said = a grasp of any sort of cooking basics gives you a very good start in learning to cook the things that take your fancy. I am still not good at cooking slabs of meat though.

It would have to be a great book for me to buy it.

Yep the kids can’t cook, they are over-privileged brats who like to eat foie gras but wouldn’t know how to scramble an egg etc etc. This view is of course nine parts crap as others have pointed out, with one part not crap and possibly more to do with technology etc than anything else. Are young people damned because they don’t darn socks/chop wood/do their washing in a copper?

And then there’s this other curious matter about the people who are on MC and what they say about wider culture. As dogpossum rightly points out, they say far more about the choices of the producers and advertisers than culture.

Anyway, one of the things I’ve repeatedly said about MC is that if I really wanted to be a chef, I wouldn’t do it by going on a reality TV show.

I’d go down the TAFE/apprenticeship route and actually learn my trade, rather than assuming my ability to make a nice dinner for my mates means I could just walk into a commercial kitchen and magically become a chef.

Ultimately I find it a little bit curious and arrogant that people assume they could run a kitchen and serve great meals for 400 covers a night or whatever just because on Sundays they make a nice lamb roast.

There’s a bit in Anthony Bourdain’s ‘Kitchen Confidential’ where he writes about people who think they can open a restaurant because they like throwing dinner parties, and his opinion of them is that they are universally deluded and doomed to fail.

I’m not lumping all the MC contestants in that boat of course and as a friend of mine pointed out that in a few weeks/months on Masterchef your average contestant is going to have experiences and training your average TAFE student can only dream about as they julienne a million carrots.

Anyway, I can’t stop watching it, so what does it matter? Eyeballs on the screen, money to the advertisers…

Ninjamoeba, I am awestruck that you don’t see the awkwardness, because for me it stands out like canine’s cojones – I think he is comfy with himself, but the others … well, Alvin’s staggering un-niceness is one example.

And Antipodean Kate, it matters not one jot that you turn to cookbooks (we all do and we should). I can cook certain simple things by feel but still have to check proportions (thank heavens I can read and write). But then you and I aren’t going to be going on national telly talking about our visions for our restaurant/cafe/cookbook – we recognise our limitations.

Is that what the original food snobbery article was about? Keeping youngsters in their place?

This is such a lovely, post, though, and I really like it as a development of the crazymad MC twittering that’s been happening lately. I especially like seeing the way people’ve developed their thinking from tweets-and-chat to longer talks. All praise the internet.

Like others have said, I tend to think of the basics as what many of us learnt from our mothers. Sure some dad’s cooked in my generation (early gen x/late boomer) but they were rare. My mum was at home full time for a large chunk of my childhood and she almost always cooked from scratch. She taught me the basics of sauteing onions til translucent, creaming butter and sugar, separating eggs, cooking meat (can’t remember the trussing but I observed it), making gravy…many of those things are lost to me now that I don’t eat meat but I “seal” tofu before stir frying much in the same way that she browned meat for a casserole. I had to teach myself Asian food and other things but the point is if you do know how to boil an egg, what heat to cook on for different effects etc than it’s easy to build on it from other cuisines.

I took a basic macro cookery cause from Tony Chiodo a few years ago. His basics included how to sharpen a knife (yeah!) and general knife skills. I got an introduction to cooking with agar agar and other ingredients that were new to me at the time. So you can teach an old dog new tricks after all :)

I’m too much of a feminist to suggest that Gen Y have skipped the basics because their mum’s and dad’s worked and took short cuts in the kitchen but if there were no other cooking mentors- how else were they to absorb such knowledge from?

But for now I wanted to jump in on a note of confusion: I don’t really understand where all the comments to the effect that Jonathan is socially strange are coming from. If there was any awkwardness last night when he was awarded le prix indien, I certainly didn’t pick up on it.

I’m also curious about the extent to which recipes are used on Masterchef: I think recipes are consulted, if only at a preliminary stage, to a much greater extent then the producers of the show let on.

While I might disagree with several of DrN’s points, I think it was a thought provoking—in a genuine and rare way—blog post.