Times are hard for Jamie Oliver. Yes, the other week he was gadding around Europe like the good old days in Jamie Cooks the Mediterranean, but his bread-and-butter, stand-there-and-cook shows have long since acquired an austere vibe. First there was Jamie’s One-Pan Wonders, which led to last year’s slightly bleak Jamie’s £1 Wonders, an explicit response to Britons being pushed en masse into poverty by inflated energy prices and hiked interest rates.
Several months on and the viewing public are, like creditors realising they won’t get paid when a Jamie Oliver restaurant goes into liquidation, still short of cash. So in Jamie’s 5 Ingredient Meals, economy is still king. Oliver remains for the whole hour in a no-frills kitchen built on a set – there are no fancy trips or celebrity tasters, nor any glimpse of the life enjoyed by the Oliver family. The food is quick, cheap and, above all, straightforward. With only five ingredients allowed per dish – all available at the supermarket that sponsors the show, and whose branding occasionally pokes unsubtly into shot – there is no scope for the sort of luxury that might alienate harassed home chefs.
Oliver is keen to advise on how to mitigate your difficult existence by finding easy fulfilment in food, and on how to do so without feeling excluded by a lack of skills or knowledge. If anything needs chopping, he emphasises that it doesn’t matter what technique you use, so long as you end up with a load of small bits; when he’s making a flour and water dough, “there’s no right or wrong way” to knead it.
At its best, the cookery is chunky, comforting, rustic fare. Oliver’s take on chicken and chips, with the ends of the legs wedged into the bars of an oven rack so the juices drip on to a roasting tin of spuds, lemon and onion below, looks hearty and hard to get wrong.
Make a recipe too simple, though, and there’s a danger that it isn’t really worth televising. A sweet pea orecchiette has the slight innovation of including finely diced potato as a second carbohydrate (“Potentially controversial … it’s double denim!”), but it’s basically pasta and peas with grated pecorino. It’s cheesy pea pasta. Even the small percentage of the audience who don’t know that you should save a bit of the starchy pasta water to use in the sauce – Oliver tells us, just in case – are surely able to knock up cheesy pea pasta, while the use of the phrase “clever little swaps” to describe subbing in parmesan or cheddar if there’s no pecorino in the fridge is a moment where the friendly encouragement starts to feel patronising.
Oliver’s version of can’t-be-arsed crisis pasta does look tasty when it’s done, but it’s still pasta with cheese on. “Mmmm,” he says, taking the first steaming mouthful. “Cheesy.” Similarly, a guest recipe cooked by London restaurateur José Pizarro – also on his own in a basic studio kitchen – looks great, but the guy’s just roasted some garlic, tomatoes and peppers and put them on toast with a boiled egg.
Our host, meanwhile, is identifying ways to “bring a little bit of sunshine to the everyday” wherever he can, and his hype will have traditional English usage pedants snapping their pencils in frustration. We “celebrate” the chicken and chips rather than merely serving it: “You can celebrate that with veggies. You can celebrate that with a lovely salad. What joy!” And the recipes don’t just use ingredients. They “showcase” or “hero” them. A spinach and feta pie, for example, is “hero-ing” a bag of frozen spinach, while Mediterranean cookery is “fantastic at hero-ing everyday ingredients”, and Oliver’s fig tart is “showcasing pre-packed fruit and nut mix”.
That supermarket fruit and nut mix really is showcased. Oliver earnestly tips the whole packet of fruity, nutty, competitively priced goodness on to his counter top so he can give the contents a full verbal hero-ing, before “wazzing” them in a blender to create what is, admittedly, a cunning and delicious-looking base for a tart. The tart has a yoghurt-based filling: “I love yoghurt – it’s gorgeous!”
When lamb meatballs are said to be “dark” and “full of attitude” just because they’ve begun to brown in the pan, Oliver is once again in danger of making cheap eats more depressing, not less, by trying too hard to find pleasure in them. As he stands isolated in his quiet, lonely kitchen, gamely urging us to keep calm and carry on cooking with basic supermarket produce, Jamie’s 5 Ingredient Meals has the air of an educational state broadcast made to raise morale after a national catastrophe – inevitably, perhaps, because that’s more or less what it is.
• Jamie’s 5 Ingredient Meals is on Channel 4.
