THE WAY WE LIVE NOW Is slow cooking a flash in the pan?

Delia Smith has given an interview calling out the trend for slow, ‘sous vide’ cooking as show-offy, and resulting in ‘grey lumps’ of meat. Old hand Christopher Howse and young gun Guy Kelly weigh in

Delia has told how she and her husband have become expert at coping when presented with slow-cooked, ‘sous vide’ meat at some Michelinstarred restaurants. ‘I get out a tissue, Michael goes, “Now!” and it goes straight in the tissue, and then in the dustbin.’

Bravo! What next – slowcooked sprouts that melt in the mouth? I’ve just read a recipe that promises to make a joint of beef ‘so tender it falls apart’. It will, we’re assured, be ‘a wonderful centrepiece for Christmas dinner’.

But what does it fall apart into? A pile of threads, that’s what, like a wooden stake that has been hammered until its end splays into shaggy filaments. The slowcooked remnants resemble an ageing artichoke leaf as juicy as felt underlay.

I like meat. I like beef on the rare side. There’s nothing meatier than the thin end of a leg of lamb where the flesh is still glutinous and whole, like a savoury plum. Welldone pork benefits from the fattiness of an adipose piggy-wiggy. But if you cook them all night, you might as well seethe some coconut matting in supermarket stock.

The high end of slow cooking is the most annoying, since it’s done by cooks who should know better. Sous vide is the smart method by which food is locked into a vacuum pack and simmered in an expensive bath to within a degree of its identity. One recipe advises you to fry the grey blob after releasing it from its watery grave, but I’m with Delia. Cut out the middleman and go straight for the bin.

We have been here before. In 1911 the rage was for paper-bag cooking. It was promoted by someone who called himself Nicolas Soyer and pretended to be the son or grandson of the great cook Alexis Soyer. A shelf of paper-bag cookery books came out from him and imitators. Its chief benefit was keeping the oven clean (unless the bag caught fire). But at least it exposed baked meats to heat for a shorter time than customary. It didn’t treat a joint of brisket as the miller’s daughter in Rumpelstiltskin did a pile of straw – try to spin it overnight into threads of gold. No matter how slow you go, it doesn’t work.

By and large, I am no fan of haste. Walking, talking, thinking, writing, decision-making, opinion-mustering, journey-completing… if I can do it at a stately clip, I will.

Far from a boast, this pathological lack of hurry is seldom helpful, especially if people around me need anything remotely soon, or I ever have to escape a burning building. But it does mean I’m suited to slow cooking.

This is lucky, because in our flat, the gas oven – which neither I nor my girlfriend chose, for we are not insane – is to some, refreshingly laissez-faire; to others, measured to the point of craven. Getting the thing to temperature takes hours.

Having it cook something safely takes longer. It means if we wish to prepare a basic sheet-pan chickenthigh dinner, the midweek meal of millennial couples everywhere, we must start in the early afternoon. A cake requires annual leave. A whole roast dinner demands we clear our diaries for a month.

Have we ever popped out for a pint, risking the very house fire I’d be useless escaping from, while our oven warms? I could not possibly say. Usually we just sit there, like the Waiting for Godot film poster, drinking and wondering why we didn’t just make a stir-fry.

Eventually, though, we eat, and even if it’s midnight it’ll be delicious. Because things cooked for a long time at a low heat invariably are. Slow and steady. Aesop never wrote a sequel about the tortoise and the hare competing to turn a kilo of beef shin into dinner, but it would have been 2-0 to our hardbacked friend, let me tell you.

In the world of slow cooking, sous vide may be high end and specific, but it has its place. Delia should probably stop wasting food and order something else. In the same interview, she said Masterchef left viewers ‘gobsmacked’ and no clearer on how to cook. It had, she said, become ‘chef ’s cooking’ instead of ‘home cooking’.

The clue is in the title, Delia. It’s like turning on Formula 1 and raging that ‘regular people will never learn how to safely parallel park from this lot!’

Or maybe they would, I don’t know. Motor racing’s a bit fast for me.