He wades in a slug-like illness of fat through the humid ground mists of the Great Kitchen. From bowls as big as baths there rises and drifts like a miasmic tide all but palpable odour of the day’s belltimber. The arrogance of this fat head exudes itself like an evil sweat. Balancing his body with difficulty upon a cask of wine, addressing a group of apprentices in their striped and sodden jackets and small white caps. They clasped one another’s shoulders for support. Their adolescent faces streaming with the heat of the adjacent ovens were quite stupified, and when they laughed or applauded the enormity above them it was with a crazed and sycophantic fervour. It’s MasterChef Goes Ghast!
They’ll have to cook the meal of their lives, again. “Passion,” they say, “all I want to do, creative, creative, passion, passion, passion!”
MasterChef, again. “These amateur cooks all want to change their lives. They could go to catering college then work as a commis on bloody awful splits, learning, grafting, like anyone else through kitchen after kitchen. Working when everyone else is not. Hot, hostile and horrid, working to make it to Sous chef, but no. That’s not it at all.”
“It’s my creative side, my passion. Creative, passion. Lovely dinner parties. Things, lovely things. Creative, passion.”
Whilst the contestants weep over their failed chocolate pudding, ingredients expert Gregg Wallace is in the fight of his life with former First Servant of Groan, Mr. Flay. “Are you lishening my pretty vermin,” he says. “Are you lishening?”
Uppermost text and illustration Mervyn Peake
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