I think the world of Gordon Ramsay, really I do, and his unimprovable Ultimate Christmas specials from 2010 would be worthwhile if only for the music soundtrack to the more traditional half of the set, but it must be said, Ramsay's Christmas shows may be the most unwittingly amusing cookery television since Julia Child. Ramsay's thesis in Ultimate Christmas is that these dishes of his are "achievable, affordable, and won't leave you stressed", they don't "cost the earth or take forever", and I suppose that's perfectly and precisely true, for a Michelin-five-star millionaire chef with yes-sir accounts at Fortnum & Mason and Harrods.
Ramsay's dishes are cartoons of overwrought, exotic, Bacchanalian show-food. Never mind the set-piece main course on what is meant to be his more conventional menu (the stuffing incorporates a "merguez" sausage, from North Africa), for breakfast Ramsay fixes pan-seared day-old loaf-sized croissants with shaved smoked salmon and runny, cream-and-chives scrambled eggs. Then for sweets he fixes scratch mint-chocolate truffles, with a small herb-garden's yield of fresh mint, bitter chocolate and half a jar of insect-labor honey to offset the bitter chocolate, and cream and double-cream. It's all in a day's work for Chef Ramsay, but the runny eggs and the ganache for the truffles both demand to-the-degree-and-to-the-second heating which any average or below-average chef could be counted on to botch comprehensively.
Even the cream for Ramsay's Christmas pudding calls for whiskey and Irish cream too: I appreciate that 99% of the British Isles are clinical alcoholics from their teens, but surely it's not an ordinary British household that stocks whiskey and Irish cream both on any given day.
Ramsay's dishes are cartoons of overwrought, exotic, Bacchanalian show-food. Never mind the set-piece main course on what is meant to be his more conventional menu (the stuffing incorporates a "merguez" sausage, from North Africa), for breakfast Ramsay fixes pan-seared day-old loaf-sized croissants with shaved smoked salmon and runny, cream-and-chives scrambled eggs. Then for sweets he fixes scratch mint-chocolate truffles, with a small herb-garden's yield of fresh mint, bitter chocolate and half a jar of insect-labor honey to offset the bitter chocolate, and cream and double-cream. It's all in a day's work for Chef Ramsay, but the runny eggs and the ganache for the truffles both demand to-the-degree-and-to-the-second heating which any average or below-average chef could be counted on to botch comprehensively.
Even the cream for Ramsay's Christmas pudding calls for whiskey and Irish cream too: I appreciate that 99% of the British Isles are clinical alcoholics from their teens, but surely it's not an ordinary British household that stocks whiskey and Irish cream both on any given day.
