One senses that, were she able to make any sense of it at all, Julia Child would be unimpressed. Escoffier it is not. It ain’t even Gordon. In design terms the ‘Top Chef  Quickfire Cookbook’ resembles, intentionally no doubt, a website as much as a book, and one feels one might make more satisfying  progress briskly clicking on the icons rather than turning the pages. But then presumably there is an online manifestation readily to hand. For here is a book that is clearly the product of synergistic, multimedia, twenty-first century thinking.

Top Chef the Quickfire Cook Book is a tie-in book for the Bravo television series ‘Top Chef’, in which each week a number of ambitious young professional chefs  test their skill and enterprise in a series of challenges in the kitchen;  ‘The ingredient challenge’ ‘The creativity challenge’ ‘The time challenge’ and so on. Their efforts are judged, with varying degrees of acuity, by a panel of celebrity chefs and television personalities, under the auspices of extravagantly glamorous Indian ex-model  Padma Lakshmi, one-time partner of celebrity author Salman Rushdie and the undoubted star of the show (foreign readers unfamiliar might imagine a super-svelte Nigella crossed with a youthful Benazir Bhutto).  Each week the least impressive ‘Cheftestant’ is eliminated, and by such means the group whittled down until a final winner is crowned.  The show smoothly melds a number of popular TV genres; instructional cooking show, prize-oriented game show, reality lifestyle makeover show, and unarguably makes for highly entertaining viewing to those with a sweet-tooth for such trifles, including this reviewer. It may – as presumably the producers would claim – even have some value in encouraging a more adventurous and creative approach to cooking in the home, though one suspects that the appetite it is primarily designed to stimulate is for more television rather than better food.

But what works on television is, unsurprisingly, nothing like so successful in book form. This is partly a function of medium; the dramatic tension which  invariably accompanies the creation of, for example, a tasty dish from a selection of unexpected random ingredients, is quite impossible to replicate in the static medium of print, which manifestly lacks both television’s ticking clock and the mouth watering promise of  a contestant’s imminent reward or punishment. Shorn of a compelling narrative, and setting aside the book’s attempts to compensate the ‘reader’  with a bewildering dogs-dinner of jazzed-up graphics, garishly clashing  colours and typefaces encompassing instructions, ‘tips and tricks’, quotes, bios, miscellaneous foodie snippets and much, much more (and less), all that remain of substance are two largely uninteresting ingredients; firstly a cast of blandly photogenic competitors who, from their publicity photos at least, would not be out of place on ‘Friends’ or indeed any typical network sitcom, and whose putative character quirks, alluded to at the book’s conclusion – ‘Class Clown — Andrew, season 4’, ‘Sweatiest — Howie, season 3’, ‘Best personality, CJ – Season 3’ never come close to leaping out of the studio and  off the page; and secondly a collection of intermittently palatable recipes which (tellingly) because they are classified according to where they fit into the show’s format rather than how they might suit an actual meal (though to be fair there is an attempt at more helpful listing at the book’s conclusion) will rarely be visited by  the home cook. It may be no great loss to the culinary canon that ‘Dave’s Grape Ape Sandwich’ and ‘Casey’s Foie Gros with Strawberry Gin Rickey’ to name but two, are quietly scraped into the recycling bin.

Top Chef the Quickfire Cook Book is available online for around $20. The book currently rates at number 183 in the Amazon.com charts, so clearly fans are buying it, and they are unlikely to be disappointed. The uninitiated would be better off with a copy of the mighty Julia’s ‘The Art of French Cooking’. And a Big Mac.

© 2009 Ben Steiner

Ben Steiner, Sheffield, UK