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The Deli

People covered in tomato juice
  • Posted at 12:32pm
  • 19 November 2007
  • by RhodriMarsden-RT

If you stick me in front of any cookery show - well, nearly any - it's like sedating me with horse tranquilliser. I'll sit there, quietly absorbing the instructions, relishing the gentle sound of chorizo being chopped or mushrooms being skewered.

It's like being transported to another world, a world where Keith Floyd is always drunk, where James Martin is always wearing a sensible pullover, and where Ainsley Harriott constantly asks, "What am I like, ladies and gentlemen?" while sprinkling parsley from a greater height than is really necessary.

I've decided to watch food programmes on cable and satellite all week, which is a bit self-indulgent, but after having had to watch "Are You Smarter than a Ten Year Old?" last week, I figure I deserve a break.

Saturday saw the beginning of the second series of The Deli, featuring chef Spud Taylor. "What? Who? Huh? Seriously?" I hear you say, which is unsurprising, as this hour-long spectacular screens on the little-watched Living in Spain channel, which exists purely to lure wealthy Britons to the Costa del Sol with the promise of it being just like East Sussex, but, like, warmer.

Spud is, as you might expect, not particularly Spanish. He's from the Wirral, in fact. "Trust me," he says at the opening of the show, which is worrying, as that's usually what people say before fleecing you of your wallet, or kidnapping your mum. "Trust me, this is a really good show, you're really going to enjoy this, don't go anywhere."

All right, Spud, it's OK, I've committed myself for the next 60 minutes. Go for it. I can't think of anyone better to inform me about Spanish cuisine than someone from the Wirral called Spud.

The programme focused on tomatoes. Spud and the camera crew went to Valencia, for that festival where the crowd pelt each other with around 120 tons of tomatoes and leave the place looking like a bloodbath, but with pips in.

I'm sure it's rooted in the deepest Spanish traditions, but I've always found it a bit offensive, and figure that if a nearby screen were simultaneously showing images of starving kids in Zimbabwe, everyone would probably take the tomatoes home and make a nourishing soup instead.

And if they need a recipe, Spud's on hand to help: the sequences of fruit-based fighting were interspersed with others of Spud at work in the deli he owns in Malaga. He's only on his second series, but he's already adopting the TV chef lingo. We'll see a lot of this during the week, but here's the first great construction: verb + foodstuff + preposition.

For example, "We're going to slice this bread down, and toast it off". The preposition is utterly unnecessary. It's a creeping TV menace. "We're going to cook this out. Then we're going to fry it off, season it up, flour it over, sieve it through and then fricassee it, er, beyond."

Spud's not the greatest TV presenter in the world, but at least it's a real kitchen - complete with battered sieves and general feeling of chaos - and he gets through the recipes with the minimum of messing about: a quick gazpacho, tomatoes on toast, a roasted red pepper soup.

But after having a bit of trouble slicing up some Spanish bread, he decides to ditch the whole Spanish thing, and instead makes some focaccia. And then he finishes up with that authentic taste of Spain, er, spaghetti puttanesca. Olé!

The Deli is on Living in Spain TV (Sky 293).

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