Your 24 October food & drink takeaways
Twenty minutes for chefs to create a dish with ingredients costing less than £5, 40 years cooking for the leaders of the world and the artist whose work is ‘liking drinking a good glass of red wine’
Just some of food & drink delights that 24 October brings to the table.
Click on the links for extra helpings.
A curated taster menu of every day’s food & drink associations
Food on screen
1994
Yes, it's 30 years to the day since popular daytime cooking programme Ready Steady Cook made its debut on BBC, presented by Fern Britton. See the first episode here.
Two teams of chefs, Red Tomato and Green Pepper {header photo} competed to create the best dish within 20 minutes using a handful of ingredients costing no more than £5 brought in by members of the public. Then the audience voted with their red tomato and green pepper cards to declare the winning team.
The programme ran from 1994–2010 (then had a brief two-series revival in 2020).
The TVGameShows website praised its entertainment value. "You don't have to concentrate a massive amount of brainpower towards it and you don't have to be able to cook, the premise of the show is that anybody can cook something good in a short space of time. And one of the reasons why it works is the laid back banter between host, chefs and contestants and there is a nice mixture of food and anecdote. The chefs usually have a big personality (and know what they're on about) and Fern Britton (or latterly, Ainsley Harriot) keeps the show rolling along."
Food and drink birthdays
1817
French chemist and inventor of margarine
1911
American chemist, invented the PET plastic beverage bottle, the first strong enough to bottle carbonated drinks
1937
Japanese celebrity chef and food writer
1953
French chef to the President of France for 40 years (1974–2014) and honorary president of The Club des Chefs des Chefs, which one must be a chef to a head of state or government to join
"Unlike their celebrity counterparts, Élysée chefs must be discreet. Vaussion never minded working in the shadows.
“The main thing is to do our job, for the president to be happy. From the moment you can express yourself through cooking, the rest doesn’t matter.
”He also liked “the notion of working for the country, of participating in its life, of being a link in the chain”.
Vaussion published Cuisine de l'Élysée last year. Recipes for oysters in saffron, salmon with caviar, fondant of crab with avocado, mille-feuille of scallops with truffles are enough to make one's mouth water."
1979
Portugese chef widely regarded as a luminary in Portuguese gastronomy
Food art of the day
Still Life with Peppers by English artist Anthony Christian, born on this day in 1945.
"To look at the drawings and paintings of Anthony Christian, whether a portrait, still life or drapery study, is to see the world through renaissance eyes – a world of rich earthy colors and forgotten sensualities. His work is powerful, robust and sensitive, possessing a wonderful fullness – like drinking a good glass of red wine.”
