Andrew Kay: In a stew

Those of you who have been paying attention – sit up at the back! – will have seen that I am currently hard at work making two programmes for our exciting new television station Latest TV, which goes live late this summer on Channel 8. Yes, that’s Channel 8 on your normal telly!

I think this has to be the busiest year of my life to date, and the two programmes that I am currently making are certainly keeping me on my toes. International Chef Exchange, or ‘ICEx’ as we like to call it, has seen me travelling to Sicily twice, Den Haag, Helsinki, Lidsköping, and to Guernsey next, as well as two previous trips to Rotterdam and Maastricht.

It’s all fun, but make no mistake it’s hard work too, with very long days and a constant need to be alert… and tidy too.

I’m not that good at tidy – far happier in a pair of shorts and a t shirt than a suit and tie these days – but needs must, and for the smarter elements of the filming I pop on some decent threads and try to look the part, to varying degrees of success.

My second programme is called Cook It! and will be a weekly cookery show in which we look at revitalising basic cooking skills and get people to think more about the way they both cook and shop for food.

“Jus, as we all know, is a fancy word for gravy, thin gravy to be accurate and not the thick stuff that our grannies might have made … but gravy none the less”

Funnily enough, it has thrown up all manner of questions, one of which is to do with language. The food and catering worlds are very good at making up new words to describe things that we already have words for. Here in the UK we love to adopt foreign words, too – assiette, melange, charcuterie, tapas, and of course the ubiquitous jus. Jus, as we all know, is a fancy word for gravy, thin gravy to be accurate and not the thick stuff that our grannies might have made … but gravy none the less. It caused major problems here when I first used the term many years back, as our vigilant sub-editor back then kept changing ‘jus’ to ‘juice’. I was not pleased, but to be honest it was a fashion that he simply had not quite bought into at that point.

I rather like James Martin on Saturday Kitchen and his blunt, Yorkshire approach to food, so I was horrified to find him with two female guests who were merrily making dishes with adopted names. I baulked at their pizza base made with cauliflower and a ragu with grated carrot added at the end, both of which they claimed would make you feel like a better person, or some such nonsense. I do not dispute that their dishes might have tasted good and been healthy; what I disliked was their use of language. From nowhere, they added the verb ‘to spiralise’ in relation to running a courgette through a device that created long shreds of the watery vegetable. This they called ‘courgettini’ – I ask you!

But the final straw was when they revealed that their own secret ingredient was a jug of cloudy liquid they had named ‘bone broth’.

Now, I’m sorry, but this was stock. They made it quite clear that it was stock, and they made it clear that they had concocted it by boiling up meat bones. Simple, we all do it – or at least we serious cooks do it.

So why oh why did they feel the need to rename one of the cornerstones of good cooking, and a great kitchen? Maybe ownership was the motivation? But you’re fooling no-one girls, stock is stock, a great thing, a vital thing in cooking good food whether it be vegetable stock, chicken stock, veal stock, fish stock, beef stock … perhaps you are considering a line of kitchenware and your key item will be the bone broth pot. Can I ask you now: will my stock pot do? Or will you require me to buy something new? To be honest I don’t have a stock pot, I use a big pan, or if I need a bigger quantity I break out the jam pan.

Life is complicated enough without people renaming things that do not need renaming. Computer developers set this silly trend by deciding that ‘menu’ was a better word for an index than ‘index’ – I rest my case.

Cook It! is recorded with a live audience. If you would like to join in, ask a question or be a guest, then contact the Latest TV crew: val@thelatest.tv