TV Cookery: Egg on their faces

Patronising, certainly, but Delia does not do it intentionally; Delia's How To Cook BBC2 Nigel Slater's Real Food Show C4

In celebrity chef circles, the question of the week is whether Delia Smith's new cookery series is patronising or not. Patronising TV? Give over! Such charges lay the accuser (in this case the irritating, book-promoting Gary Rhodes) open to counter-charges involving stones and glass houses. All cookery programmes are patronising, none more so than the ones that seek to replace instruction with lecturing, that encourage us to change our thinking about food. Celebrity chefs nowadays approach their task armed with the notion that their viewers are terrible cooks and worse eaters. They don't even like they way we shop.

Don't get me wrong. I like being patronised. I especially like cooking programmes, in particular the ones that offer me a whole culinary lifestyle, without bothering me about how long I'm going to have to stand there stirring to get it. I suppose these aren't cooking programmes so much as food programmes, but I do love their alternate universe, where cooking is simple and enjoyable, instead of a big pain in the neck. I wish I lived there.

Delia's How To Cook is more of an old-fashioned cookery programme, almost an instructional video. This week Delia threw down a gauntlet to all who would call her patronising by doing something ultra-patronising: she showed us how to separate an egg. This is episode three, the first I've seen of the series, and I was left wondering what she covered in the first two. I am reliably informed that one of them showed viewers how to make toast.

To be fair, Delia moved on swiftly to other, trickier egg things, like meringues and hollandaise sauce. And it wasn't all review. We learned that "egg whites hate grease", which is something that never even occurred to me. Delia's aim with this series to teach people the basic cooking techniques they should have learned from their mothers, and if there's one thing she illustrates clearly, it's why people didn't listen to their mothers. While she demonstrates the incremental difference between egg whites at the soft peak and stiff peak stages, your eyes wander to the windows at the back of her kitchen, and you can't help noticing that it's a lovely day. Her manner only fuels the desire to go out and play. Her delivery is dry as dust, and she's unbelievably fussy. She rubs lemon on the egg whisk's tines to prevent egg whites from touching their natural enemy grease. When separating eggs, she suggests using a separate bowl for each egg, so that accidental yolk slippage doesn't contaminate the whole bunch. It's logical, I agree, but I still wouldn't do it. Her meringue technique is simple and - if you do exactly what she says - fail-safe, but it takes about 12 hours from start to finish.

I think Delia's patronising air is at least partly accidental. She keeps up a seemingly unscripted patter all the time she is cooking, and sometimes she has to fill in while the food catches up with the monologue. Gems like "a saucepan is a pan for making sauce" are not meant to cause offence, and they are certainly preferable to her forays into actual anecdote. She introduced the custard portion of the programme with, "Now, I want to remind you of a quote, said by a Frenchman". It was something about France having a hundred sauces and one religion, and England being the other way round. She should probably stick to the basics. None of this will stop me from tuning in next week, to learn how to open a banana.

Nigel Slater's Real Food Show rounded off a disappointing week for anyone hoping to learn how to make profiteroles or joint a rabbit by exploring the sandwich. Slater skimmed the basics, the club, the BLT, the croque monsieur and the cucumber sandwich, before dragging out the giant foccacio and drizzling olive oil everywhere. Most of his offerings were simple - he perceptively calls sandwich-making "a question of speed and greed" - but he still brought on a woman whose peanut butter and jelly sandwich recipe starts with making the bread. Sandwich-making is also a matter of personal eccentricity and irrational conviction - it's very hard to watch someone use too much mayonnaise or add some inappropriate beet root without shuddering.

Nigel Slater, while perfectly capable of adding lemon juice to a dish "to make the whole thing really loud", is refreshingly down to earth when he wants to be. His perfect bacon sandwich includes plenty of ketchup and floppy bacon. "The bread", he insists, "must be of the worst sort". Looking up from the slightly gruesome results, he says, "To really enjoy a bacon sandwich, I think you've got to be a bit drunk." Although his generous, Devil-may-care approach to cooking is a million miles away from Delia's do-as-I-do instruction, you don't get much more patronising than sandwich lessons.

Both Delia and Nigel have to compete in a world that has been revolutionised by Celebrity Ready Steady Cook, which has changed our notion of what TV cooking is. (It's also changed our notion of what a celebrity is. This week one was from a docusoap.) But all these shows have the same weird elemental appeal. My three-year old son is currently obsessed with a particularly soul-less cooking video from the library, in which disembodied hands make different kinds of biscuits over the course of an hour. He watches it over and over, in complete silence. When I protest that it's boring, he just says, "It's not boring for me", without lifting his eyes from the screen. Delia would be like Fantasia to him, if only he could stay up.