Masterchef Recap: The Dark Ages
The Willy Wonka boat ride through the tunnel of pure evil that is Heston Week continues. The ranks of the amateurs have grown ever thinner, with only four contestants not yet pitched into the week’s elimination: Hairy Harry, Talkative Theresa, Erratic Elise, and…Mimi, I think her name is?
Those four, dressed in white aprons to denote the fact that they are still valued as people, walk into the lush grounds of Rippon Lea, an old house in Melbourne notable for being old. There they see the amateurs marked for elimination, dressed in black aprons to denote the fact that they are hated by God, and the judges, who inform the four that they will each prepare one course of a four-course feast. Each amateur will be given a recipe from a century past, because that’s the page in the Big Book of Whatever that Heston stuck his pin in this morning. The least impressive dish will send its maker into elimination, although as usual “impressive” is an extremely subjective term.
“Am I going to be able to think quick enough?” Theresa asks, a needless doubt, because of course she won’t be able to think quick enough: she never is.
Mimi, who is making the first course, is feeling supremely confident because there were no “fancy techniques back in the day”, an attitude that betrays her woeful ignorance. Her confidence lasts about five seconds, right up till she looks at her recipe, which she can’t understand. She says it’s written in “ye olde English”, which it isn’t, it’s just written in English, but in a slightly old-fashioned style. This utterly flummoxes Mimi, however, who stares in bafflement at the recipe as if she’s trying to decipher a fragment of Minoan pottery. This is what you’d expect from someone who uses the term “ye olde” to mean “something from the past”.
Theresa is similarly confused by her recipe, which is from 1490, but for the first time in the series, Theresa simply puts her head down and gets on with it, in stark contrast to Mimi, who is still gazing at the recipe and reading bits out aloud, before looking at the camera and saying, “what?” All the bits she reads out are English words, but Mimi has convinced herself that the recipe is in a foreign language and her brain utterly refuses to work. “Saffron and salt?” she says quizzically, as if to say, “Snozzberries and Flumweazels?”
In order to level the playing field, Gary wanders over to Theresa’s workstation to undermine her confidence, which was sky-high until the jolly Englishman subtly suggested that she didn’t have the faintest clue what she’s doing. Theresa immediately starts having a nervous breakdown.
Meanwhile Elise is feeling really good as she prepares some kind of tart or something. Her calm demeanour and air of competence is making it extremely difficult for the producers, who were hoping that every contestant would suffer similarly crippling anxiety.
Harry is last to start, making the fourth course. His recipe is for a trifle, a result he is overjoyed with because of the time he tried to make a trifle once before but got stabbed in the back by Brett. Fortunately Brett is not involved in this challenge, having already stabbed Chloe in the back earlier in the week.
Mimi is making mushy peas. She knows Heston likes mushy peas because he’s from England, although the real reason Heston likes mushy peas is that they remind him of snot, his favourite food. She has apparently managed to translate the recipe sufficiently to at least have a stab at it, but she’s already wasted a lot of time scratching her head wondering what “rost samon” could POSSIBLY mean.
Speaking of wasting time, Gary enlists George as his wingman in his ongoing quest to make Theresa feel bad about herself. They succeed, Theresa’s smile fading from her face as she realises she doesn’t have enough time to complete her dish, especially after the five minutes she just spent listening to Gary and George tell her she doesn’t have enough time to complete her dish.
Meanwhile Mimi is panicking because guests are arriving at the stately home and her dish is boring and forgettable and often gets confused for other more popular dishes on the show. Looking at the recipe, she sees once more the word “saffron”, and a lightbulb goes off over her head: that might mean saffron! She puts saffron in her sauce and apparently it works, if you can believe Mimi.
Elise is still cooking but nothing she’s doing is very interesting. She says she’d be proud of herself if she can survive Heston Week, as she should be: anyone who survive Heston Week has done well, and I include viewers in that: all of you who’ve watched Heston Week and are still alive, give yourselves a pat on the back.
Harry is putting coffee in his trifle because Heston Week has curdled his brain.
George starts yelling at Mimi for want of anything better to do, causing Mimi to start plating and Theresa to check whether her chicken is cooked, which it isn’t, as the prophecy foretold.
Mimi’s dish is a rather attractive small pink blob sitting on a bed of mucus in the middle of a huge white plate. It’s the sort of nouvelle cuisine that really makes you regret the entirety of western civilisation. The author of the recipe she worked from is cursing her from the grave. Naturally all the judges love it.
Time is running out for Theresa. Her sous vide chicken should be cooked, but the skin has burst and the chicken has dried out and it’s all a cautionary tale about the dangers of being a tosser who sous vides things. Matt arrives to tell her to plate up, and Theresa starts flapping her arms and squealing. She can’t plate up, she’s not cooked it yet. She frenziedly throws stuff onto plates and squirts jus and drops raisins and sweats like a wrestler and as usual gets it done in the nick of time. But at least her chicken is browned off, and it’s not alone there.
The judges snootily note that Theresa’s dish is rushed and looks terrible and has a vulgar working class accent, but it tastes good, and oddly for Heston Week, taste seems to actually count for something. George objects to the number of raisins he has, but it’s always something with him.
Elise is plating up now, and is hoping to cut through the fennel flavour, something she could’ve achieved by not putting fennel in in the first place. “If you love fennel, you’ll love this,” she says, which seems like a huge risk to take.
Elise’s recipe was for “Taffaty Tarts”, a 17th century dish notable for being mostly imaginary. Everyone loves Elise’s Taffaty Take — turns out they do love fennel. Heston says it tastes delicious, but you can tell that at this late stage of the week he is genuinely struggling to continue feigning interest in anything that’s going on.
At this point Harry declares his intention to give his dessert a “Harry Heston twist”, and everyone on earth rolls their eyes simultaneously. He decides to make something called “white chocolate snow”, with red wine, which is…I dunno, fine, I guess? Unfortunately the snow splits, which I assume from his facial expression is a bad thing for snow to do. But as Billy Ocean sang, when the snow splits, the tough get going. Desperate to “do something Hestony”, Harry notices the liquid nitrogen bench, and is struck by an idea: why not kill everyone? Luckily for his victims he goes with plan B: freezing some stuff and then smashing some stuff and then dropping the stuff into the trifle glasses where it makes smoke and is supposed to look cool.
Matt is concerned that the dish has veered towards tiramisu — the steering mechanism has obviously failed. However, it is entirely possible that he’s just pretending that Harry’s trifle had a flaw in order to make the end more suspenseful.
The amateurs meet the judges in the garden in the middle of the night, where Gary pretends the scenery is really beautiful. Heston tells them that every dish was a success “on one level or another”, meaning that some of them were a success on the “you didn’t technically murder anyone” level.
Matt informs the amateurs that with “dishes this good”, success or failure has its foundation in the kitchen. Are there dishes where this is not the case? Does the success or failure of some dishes lie in the bathroom, or the linen cupboard?
Anyway what he means is that Theresa ran out of time so she goes into elimination, duh.
Tune in tomorrow night, when seven amateurs are forced to dig their own graves.
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