2 Wednesday December 22 2021 | the timestimes2
become known as culinary cultural
appropriation. Some fusion cooking is
insultingly nonsensical. A pho burger?
That would be Vietnamese noodle
soup in a bun. A banh mi bowl?
Banh mi is Vietnamese for bread, so
a rice dish served in a bowl will never
be banh mi.
“You can’t create fusion by just
forcing two things together,” he says.
“If you want to really fuse a dish you
need to break each dish down to the
roots. Where did they come from?
What is the origin of the dish? Find
out why each ingredient is used,
then you can start introducing it.”
With his background, knowledge
and passion for food, Lee, of course,
can fuse away.
At school, however, despite his
aunt’s culinary boot camp, it did not
occur to him to pursue a career in
catering. He did well at GCSE, but
his choice of A-levels — business,
German, geography and ancient
history — indicated a young man
uncertain of where he was heading.
He made some “bad choices”, dropped
out, signed on. As part of the benefits
scheme, he was obliged to see a career
adviser, who asked him what he
enjoyed doing. He said cooking,
occasionally. He was 17 and this
woman changed his life. At University
College Birmingham, a pastry-chef
tutor cast his eye over Lee’s creditable
academic qualifications and asked if
he was really sure he wanted to be a
chef. By now he was.
After gaining a diploma and some
work experience, Lee bought himselfa one-way ticket to New Zealand
guessing correctly that a trained chef
could cook his way back home via
some of the great cuisines of the
world. After a year, he spent two
weeks back in England and then
flew to Italy. That winter, in France,
he was joined by his cousin Jake, who
was about to become a professional
cook and is now, Lee says, a “genius”
pastry chef.
On his travels, Lee learnt plenty,
but not always the right things.
Speaking to this open, engaging man
who clearly loves people as much as
he loves cooking for them, I find it
hard to credit, but he was once a
shouty chef.
“I got given my first head chef job
quite early. It was a hotel in France
and I was 21 years old. So I was
inexperienced. I wasn’t ready for it.
I wasn’t ready in terms of peopleT
hree days to go and —
finally! — I know what
I want for Christmas. It
is, Santa, a job at 10
Downing Street. Guys,
I think I’d be a great
addition to the team. I
can definitely drink
alcohol while “working” and wouldn’t
give a toss if it was lockdown or within
earshot of St Thomas’
Hospital, where
doctors and nurses
were staggering
with exhaustion
and weeks earlier
had saved Boris
Johnson’s life.
Anyone need
a top-up?
Crucially, I also
feel a towering sense
of entitlement and
superiority over my
fellow citizens, some
of whom were
literally dying alone
when the prime
minister’s garden
party photo was
taken. I’d be
honoured to get the
chance to shine here, because when
I see a rule book I tear it up and
consider “social distancing” to be
for obeisant plebs. It may sound
sucky-uppy, but I found it inspirational
when the PM declined to wear
a mask while sitting next to Sir
David Attenborough. If you can’t
put personal comfort first during a
pandemic while breathing over a
95-year-old national treasure, when
can you? But it’s mostly because you
all seem to have that work-play
balance thing nailed. By which I mean
none of you seemed to be doing a tap
of work. Yes, I’d love a bit more
Stinking Bishop, thanks.
As we can all see in that glorious
May 2020 photo, taken sneakily,
apparently from No 11, this was a
“place of work”, and therefore a cheese
and wine gathering could be classed as
a “business meeting” despite the rest
of us being arrested and fined merely
for sitting on a park bench. We know
this because Dominic Raab explained
that it was obvious because the
attendees were “all in suits or
predominantly business attire”. Ah. As
we know, a well-cut suit, especiallySo it’s not
all about
choice
Hats off to antivaxers.
Just when you think
they can’t get any
more stupid and
selfish, they do. At
Wembley Stadium
they reportedly
“block-booked” vaccine
appointments then
failed to show, thus
preventing others
from getting one.
Outstanding imbecility.
They do know how
vaccines work? Every
time somebody else
sticks their arm out for
what the conspiracy
morons say gives you
swollen testicles and
a Bill Gates chip,
it increases herd
immunity. The
unvaccinated benefit.
Sabotaging that is like
slashing the tyres of
the ambulance coming
to save you because it
uses diesel.
Aren’t these people
all about “my body, my
choice”? What about
the choice of the
person who wants a
booster but you’ve
fake-booked them all?
What if I want multiple
jabs and to turn my
arm into a Pfizer
pincushion? My body,
my choice, mate. I
doubt they even
believe the so-called
side effects are a thing.
As the joke about the
man who refuses a jab
citing “side effects”
goes, “But they said
masturbation made you
blind, Gary, and yet
here you are without
a white stick.”Claire Foy
is not in
the mood
in the BBC’s A Very
British Scandal has said
that filming sex scenes
is “the grimmest thing
you can do”. Oh, I can
believe it: it usually falls
to women to fake the
gurning “orgasm face”
and not the man
(apparently you imagine
stepping barefoot on anupturned plug. Do
try it when you’re not
“in the mood”).
I have never acted,
but I imagine that in
some ways these new
inventions to protect
privacy make it worse,
not better. Genital
guards, for instance.
Who wants to rollaround on a bed with
what looks like a plastic
fish slice Sellotaped to
their nethers? Ditto
nipple pasties, modesty
pouches and, the worst,
merkins. Gongs to
anyone who can
pull off eroticism
while wearing a
hairy sporran.Claire Foy, who plays
the Duchess of Argyll,
aka “the dirty duchess”,while sipping a crisp pinot, prevents
the spread of Covid. Matt Hancock
demonstrated this expertly when using
his hands, face and zero space when
groping the buttocks of his lover while
wearing that all-important suit.
(Please note, your suits did not count
when attending your gran’s funeral,
hence the legal maximum
of five mourners. Keep up, sheeple.)
Mr Raab added that
they deserved to relax
because they’d been
working under
“gruelling conditions”.
Let’s just pause here
for a cheery wave
to the staff at St
Thomas’ again. Don’t
worry, nurse. The
government was busy
cooking up a stonking
1 per cent pay rise
for you. Now, back
to work. Those
ventilators won’t
check themselves.
This job feels so
right because in the
picture I can see no
laptops, no notebooks
— not even a pen!
But there does appear to be Boris
Johnson’s dog, baby and wife. I’m so
looking forward to bringing the
whole family to work. I can also bring
experience in workplace drinking. In
Fleet Street in the early 1990s we
had this nailed, popping out every
lunchtime for a couple, and sometimes
even in the mornings while the editors
were in conference. This was known as
a “conference quickie”. In the office
we’d crack open a bottle to celebrate
anything. Literally.
Admittedly, it has been about 20
years since any journalist did this.
Now we’re more likely to be found
with bad breath and greying skin
hunched over a computer with a
triangular al desko sandwich, but
I’m sure the muscle memory remains.
Give it a week and I’ll be back on
form. So what do you say? I have
many great ideas, such as wasting
£2.6 million on a White House-style
briefing room then just using it
to show Downing Street staff the
Bond film No Time to Die. But you
already beat me to it. I’m loving the
irony of the film title, by the way.
When do I start?Carol Midgley
Santa, I want a job at
No 10 — it reminds me
of work in the Nineties
From my aunt’s
As a child he made spring rolls at his
auntie’s place. Then Dan Lee cooked
his way around the world and became
a TV winner, writes Andrew Billen
T
he night before the
last MasterChef: The
Professionals the
finalist Liam Rogers
had a dream in which
he was beaten to the
title by his rival Dan
Lee. As if to honour
the nightmare, the next day Rogers’s
subconscious persuaded him to
leave a sliver of clingfilm on judge
Marcus Wareing’s plate. So Lee, the
personable, modest 29-year-old private
chef from Birmingham, indeed lifted
the silver-plated MasterChef trophy.
Watched by 3.7 million BBC1
viewers last week, the final was the
culmination of 22 episodes of triumph
and disaster (that undercooked
chicken Dan presented to Gregg
Wallace!), of 15-hour days, of lost sleep
and a kitchen studio in east London
so tense that the chefs had no time
even to glance at what their potential
nemeses were cooking. At the end of
it all, Michelin-starred Wareing called
Lee a “fantastic chef” and “a star in the
making”. Lee announced his intention
of grabbing a bucket of chicken, a
bottle of chablis and a jigsaw puzzle,
and going home.
It was not until The Times’s
photoshoot this week that he
discussed the victory with his aunt
Kwai Lee, at whose takeaway eight-
year-old Dan rolled his first spring roll.
“We had some food afterwards and
it was the first time my auntie and I
had properly sat down and spoken
since the final,” Lee says over Zoom
from his bedroom in his parents’
house that afternoon. “I did ask her,
‘Did you enjoy it? Did you like the
show?’ And she had a few funny
comments. She’s a trained Chinese
chef and she said there were a few
points that I should have improved on.
She’s my harshest critic, and I
appreciate that.”
Lee was brought up in Birmingham,
the son of a Cantonese father, a
retired energy company executive,
and an Anglo-Irish mother, whom the
Chinese side of the family would trick
into eating delicacies such as duck
tongue and chicken feet — the latter,
fermented in black bean sauce and
topped with a rice-noodle “sheath” and
crispy shallots, was one of Lee’s dishes
in the antepenultimate episode.
His mixed heritage confused him as
a child, he says. “Looking back now,
I’d say I didn’t find it hard but I would
say I was never properly comfortable.”
He recalls the casual racism of his
classmates at Hall Green Secondary
School. “If they said it to me now I’d
absolutely go mental, but I was shy.
It was just me, essentially, that was
Chinese growing up in my school.”
The fusion cooking that won him
the professional MasterChef title is,
of course, a glorious expression of his
mixed heritage. He nevertheless
shares concerns about what hasI screamed at
people — I have
been that chef.
I’d absolutely flip