Richard Madeley’s ‘Ghastly’ Tuna Fish Bake

Richard Madeley has been doing the Radio 2 6-8am show on a Saturday while Zoe Ball is on maternity leave. Having not been a devotee of daytime TV I’ve listened to the show with absolute fascination as he’s completely unpredictable: you never know what’s going to come out of his mouth next. It’s like ghoulishly waiting for an oral car-crash to happen. It can be very endearing and revealing, though. I heard him recently on the radio saying something I’ve hardly ever heard about a famous actor — that he’d met this actor at a party and he was completely pissed (can’t remember exactly who it was now). Most of the luvvies cover all this up when addressing the likes of you and me.

I only caught the end of his show this morning but I listened with increasing horror to his ‘recipe’ for Tuna Fish Bake. He apparently Twittered on Thursday that he was cooking it for his dinner (who says Twitter is all about trivia?). ‘Yup,it’s a culinary legend tonight, all tins,packets and e-numbers.Utter rubbish but tasty as hell’. He then gave out the recipe, if it can be called that:

  •  Tuna bake:1 tin chickn&1tin mushrm soup.2 tins tuna.Prawns.Mushrooms.Mixed herbs.Peas/sweetcorn.Dash w. wine.S&Pepper.Serve w pasta.Delish.
  • &two bags of crushed crisps.Mix it up,top put uncrushed crisps on top and bake for 30″.Vile recipe but comfort food like Heinz Tom Soup. 2:49 PM Feb 4th from web
  • Crushed crisps make it less runny;crisps on top make it, well, crispy.How tastily ghastly! 3:03 PM Feb 4th from web

Get more on his Twitter page.

This was apparently what he cooked Judy Finnegan on their first date! If the tins of soup are decent quality the recipe might not be too bad up to the entrance of the crisps. It’s those that catapult it into the league of completely bizarre crap. The recipe made it into the Daily Mail and he reprised it on the radio. If his recipes have anything like the pull of Richard and Judy’s book club then the supermarket shelves will be being stripped of tins of mushroom soup and tuna as I type.

Anyone who refers to tuna as ‘tuna fish’ immediately strikes a soft spot with me as I’m old enough to remember when it was thought of as something of a delicacy (thus you had to stress that it was fish) and didn’t have the cat-meat status that food snobs confer on the tinned stuff today.