Pour one out for an icon.

Lunch Lady Doris did nothing wrong!

Previously on MasterChef…

if only they knew what was just around the corner.

Schools Out

With the Two Course Menu Challenge having tapped out from the quarterfinal, it has been replaced by The Critic Trying to Be Relatable Challenge. Up first was William Sitwell whose task of choice was for the quarterfinalists to reinvent a terrible school dinner. It’s a really fun challenge, or it would’ve been if it was given by anyone other than the man who looks like a tory politician barely clinging on to his local constituency

I’m not sure we’re in a cultural zeitgeist at the moment where the first thing you associate with the words “school dinner” is Anonymous Stew anymore

Personally, my worst ever school dinner was Soup. What kind of Soup? We were never told, it just appeared and we were expected to trust that the tiny grey things floating in it were at least at one point in their lives peas and not the last remnants of a circus poodle that had jumped its last hoop

The worst thing is you knew when it was coming because the whole school would stink for the entire hour preceding lunch so the environmental science lesson at 11am had more suspense than the average Hitchcock movie. The only upside was that we had to eat outside, so if you managed to get out of eyeshot of the teachers you could dig a hole and bury it. This is indeed my Holes-style confession that the playground of Lendy Park has a wealth of soup deposits now. Other meals I regularly buried: Unidentifiable Meat Sandwiches, Weirdly Orange Mince Pie That Tasted Like Nothing From This Earth and Vienna Sausages In Gravy. I’m not saying I was the reason our school had a feral dog problem but… I might have been the reason the school had a feral dog problem.

The closest we were getting to reinvented soup was from Louise, who everyone did think was just declaring war on the Burton M6 Northbound Travelodge

a war that Steven Arnold will blindly join her on

“You have my sword.”
“And you have my bow.”
“And my completely unnecessary axe to grind!”

Staffordshire Lobby as it turns out is a corned beef stew that wikipedia informs was traditionally the staple lunch of poorly paid potters so if The Great Pottery Throwdown wants a little more historical accuracy and a little more torture…

Louise’s main method of reinventing the Staffordshire Lobby was to just not make the Lobby at all and valiantly tried to avoid saying the word “deconstructed”. However, John has been doing this for 20 years, he knows when someone is cooking up a nonsense

and sure enough, it was a sort of jigsaw of stew ingredients centering around a nice piece of admittedly beautifully cooked steak

I need to study the instinct within people that doesn’t let them plate up carrots normally. They’re either languishing over a piece of meat like a Victorian dowager hearing something scandalous or erected to the sun like a pagan obelisk.
The judges’ main issue was the fact she’d over corrected and had just given them a very nice steak dinner instead of something that even vaguely resembled her Trauma Stew. She could’ve just included a shot of her washing up water on the side

it’s the budget friendly alternative to GamerGirl Bath Water.

Olivia had decided she was going to do fish as she’d gone to a Catholic School which don’t eat meat on a Friday

it’s nice to know that fish is to Catholics as chicken is to the Toby Carvery – my brothers and I have never stopped talking about the time we went to a Toby Carvery and for some reason the chicken was inexplicably categorised as a limitless vegetable.
I could relate to Olivia’s, the second junior school I went to wasn’t Catholic but it was definitely aspirationally Catholic. It just didn’t have the budget for the full pomp and circumstance of it all so every second friday we got tilapia that tasted of mud. I couldn’t bury it either because this school had a dining room so you could try slipping it into your pocket and just praying to Non-Catholic Jesus that you were able to change into your afternoon sports kit before the fish grease seeped through your khakis. I’m sorry, this recap has fast become Childhood Trauma 101

I can’t even parody this show anymore because they’ve just started saying the things I write out loud.
Olivia did however absolutely smash this brief out of the park and I think did the best job of turning a school dinner into a restaurant dish

the judges really liked the refinement of the dish and the only person who probably topped her was Hope who had turned The Gimmick-o-Metre up to 11 for her packed lunch

I’ll allow it because she executed it all so well so you can’t really say she’s Pulling a Frances Quinn and hiding a lack of inventiveness behind a series of hand-whittled squirrels she made herself. And plus she had a lunch box that made me cackle

it’s Gregg having the MasterChef logo branded onto his forehead that gets me. Obviously his kryptonite is a Mars Bar

he’s powerless in the presence of a train station vending machine.

The dish that felt the least like it had any real grounding in a school dinner was probably Brin’s which I blame predominantly on him using prawns, a food item that has not once passed the threshold of a school

I do at least appreciate that he slapped that leek puree down with the force of a dinner lady that’s just had her last nerve fried by some little shit in a Fortnite t-shirt and John could sense the palpable sadness

he’s an ~empath~.

Fateha has bravely attempting a dessert despite admitting that her baking skills aren’t the strongest. Her reasoning behind this was that she wanted to showcase something that felt more rooted in British cuisine. Her target of choice being a Jam Tart and Obligatory Custard which she was also serving alongside an iced sponge cake

it was probably a mistake to take on a dessert for this particular challenge because I think at most schools the pudding inevitably felt like a reward for wading through the quagmire of carbonara going through a depressive episode. So of course the overly refined, slightly joyless take on custard felt a little bit like trying to rewatch Blinky Bill at 3am because you can’t sleep and finding out every single character in your favourite cartoon as a child is eye-gougingly annoying

growing up is discovering that the teacher characters you were meant to hate as a child were right the whole time for being annoyed by the protagonist who caused a forest fire by burning books.

And lastly we come to Jerome’s Last Hurrah which may be the most perfectly executed MasterChef Disaster we’ve ever seen. Even the Russian judge would have to score him at least a 7.5 for this double salchow of a palaver. He was probably being the bravest of all the contestants and seeking retribution for the millenials that have long sought revenge on Jamie Oliver for what he did to the highly processed nuggets of miscellaneous meat that triggered more serotonin in our tiny brains than was ever explainable

but before you could cheer and join in his battle cry, he raised the reddest of flags

you know how Jamie Oliver completely failed to put kids off chicken nuggets despite showing them how they were made?

well, I think he might have had more success with showing them Jerome’s Jerry-built Emulsified Turkey Sausage process

you know how Frankenstein thought he was creating perfect human life and he actually created an 8 foot tall, sallow skinned zombie with more strength than he could have comprehended? I’m just saying, I hope they properly disposed of those waterlogged lumps of emulsified turkey flesh before they show up in Geneva to commit a misunderstood murder spree.

The turkey wasn’t even the only thing on the plate but it did rather eclipse his disappointingly unburnt lasagne despite its small stature

I’m absolutely obsessed with the fact he went in there hoping to reinvent a bad school dinner and just made a sort of HGH fuelled school dinner cockfight

this is my favourite Renaissance painting.

A School Cafeteria Trauma Ranking:
1. Hope’s Box o’Gimmicks
2. Olivia’s God-fearing Cod
3. Brin Just Made a Very Nice Curry
4. Louise’s Dry Stew
5. Fateha’s Detention Tart
6. Assorted Horse Parts (NOW WITH MORE TESTICLES!)
7. That Time I Was Forced To Eat Cottage Pie After I’d Accidentally Spilled Apple Juice Into To
8. My Burial Ground of Soup
9. Jerome Proving Jamie Oliver May Have Had a Point

We were meant to lose half of the contestants at this point, ultimately they decided Jerome’s acts of culinary terrorism accounted for at least two people so we only ended up losing him and Fateha

I’ll miss Fateha’s kind eyes but I’m going to miss Jerome tremendously. He has been my absolute favourite contestant to write about and I’m sure there’s a much more exciting alternative universe where he wins the whole thing.