The Observer Review: May 71

It wasn't easy, at a distance, to fit a military cooking competition into the spectrum of martial activity. Would it be like a Tattoo with marching and counter marching round the kitchens and a lone piper standing in the sink? Or more a manoeuvre with bell tents in the mud and pots of stew suspended over campfires on crossed sticks? You would certainly have expected a warlike flavour to the cuisine. Peas shelled by the Royal Artillery; a bombe surprise by the contingent over from Belfast.

There was none of this. Last week’s finals of the Army Cookery Competition were held in conditions more appropriate to a theological college. Cleanliness, calm and a tendency towards such vicarage fare as sultana scones, cabbage and poached fish. The finals were held in the new Training Centre of the Army Catering Corps at Aldershot, a bland modern tower block devoid of any defensive works. even those appropriate to the Corps such as that type of embrasure from which pots of boiling water used to be poured on attackers beneath;

Here, in what the Army claim to be the world’s largest concentration of catering capability – 58 kitchens and some 600 cookers – 37 male and nine female warriors engaged in a surprisingly gentle tournament. They were obliged to prepare a three course lunch within a time limit, working in teams, and there was also an individual competition for cakes and gateaux, sugar confections and those shiny savouries, entrenched in aspic, which grace the finest cold tables.

The modern Army, you were forced to conclude, marches on an increasingly delicate stomach but an attempt had been made to preserve a modicum if militarism. Upstairs in the kitchens, many contestants wore, above their white chefs’ coats and spongebag trousers, glengarries and tam o'shanters with fierce hackles, Tank Corps berets and even, in one case, a proud Guardsman's cap. Below, in the trendy salon of the new Training Centre, there was an impressive array of officers in their best uniforms accompanied by their ladies in floral prints and floppy hats. One officer wore jodhpurs, Marshal Foch riding boots with spurs and carried a crop, evidently under the impression that he was attending a military point-to-point, and you could see how the confusion arose; there was closed circuit television to watch the competitors in the kitchens and a commentator with authentic Royal Tournament voice kept up a racy dialogue: "There’s Lance Corporal Witherington just finishing orf his Cauliflower Polonaise. This is getting very exciting!"

A large board billowed the spectators to keep a minute-by-minute check on the progress of the runners and there was even a guide to form executed with military exactitude: Number, Rank, Name, Type of Engagement and Remarks. ' Sergeant Prestedge – 12 years' service Royal Marines. Competed in Army Competition five years ago, 1st and 2nd m Table d’Honeur. Keen parrot breeder, has 200 in his house at present.’

There was not much to do during the cooking except to wave your cane at the confections on the Table d’Honeur and murmur ' Well done, well done,’ but none of these had a truly martial appearance – sugar roses in teapots and pink mousse instead of marzipan Howitzers and ham glazed to look like armour-plate.

I was button-holed by a Catering Corps major who told me that the cooks at Tobruk had taken over some Italian guns and pooped off at the enemy and that all of them today were trained fighting men too, but, actually that was not the point. The message of the competition was the wholly adorable effect made by the Army nowadays to stop military cooking being a misery second only to getting shot,

You could see that none of the competitors, including the WRAC team, were other than tough and fit and soldierly rather than a lot of floury-fingered pastry-poufs. You wouldn’t have risked asking any of them for a recipe in a dark alley. I was much more pleased to hear that the chef at the Hilton in Kathmandu is an ex-Catering Corps chap and the head chef at the Park Lane Hotel and the head of catering for the Metropolitan Police.

The Corps can now hold its own with any civilian competition. At last year’s Salon Culinaire International de Londres, in competition with some of the best chefs in Europe. tihe soildiers gained 79 awards including 13 challenge trophies and 14 gold medals. The Galloping Gourmet was in the ACC as well. It seemed to me that the real challenge was to keep such first-class professiqnals in the Army at all instead of sloping off to the Savoy Grill or Pruniers in Paris. The excellences of the Catering Corps, however, don’t stop at cooking. You can earn £12,000 a year as an Al Army chef but if you remain in the Service for a long career you can be trained up to the highest levels of catering management and get a very good job when you’re demobbed. ‘You might say we dangle a carrot,’ said the Major. I was glad I didn’t say it. Army cooking is clearly no longer a joke.