With his crab soufflé, Ed Balls shows how to overcome the ultimate rejection

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/23/crab-souffle-ed-balls-spectator

Version 0 of 1.

Ed Balls, the man who was once Gordon Brown’s uomo d’affari (the man sent out to do the business), then a cabinet minister, then a Labour leadership contender, shadow chancellor and now an ex-MP has become ... a cookery writer. Today he launches a new column, in the Spectator.

Related: Ed Balls loses Morley and Outwood seat following recount

Writing about cooking is more revealing than being pictured for an interview in your second kitchen. Either this is proof that cooking is the only human activity that has no politics, or it will come to be seen as the first move in a tectonic realignment of social democracy.

For a start, why has Balls chosen a rightwing weekly to break into the national cooking scene? It’s far too easy to suggest it’s just because its editor Fraser Nelson is a clever, funny and astute observer of the political scene who was probably an old mate in Westminster days.

This, surely, is the next chapter of Ed Balls masquerading as not Ed Balls, or rather not the Ed Balls whose name for a time was a byword for a particular kind of macho political bullying. This is the new, all-political-ambition-spent Ed Balls, the family man who poses for pictures with a tray of freshly baked cupcakes. (I always took that to be a gesture of loyalty to his wife, Yvette Cooper: proof that theirs really is a partnership of equals.)

Balls' list of ingredients has the odd explosive device hidden in it

Trying to blot out old impressions is fine, but it’s far from clear where this metamorphosis is heading. Writing in the Spectator (total paid-for circulation: around 50,000) means Balls can assume his readers will mostly pride themselves on their sophistication. He can devise recipes that take for granted a certain level of disposable cash. He can safely bet that not many of his voters in Doncaster will read his culinary advice.

But this is a high-risk strategy: he is repositioning himself not so much out of plate-throwing distance of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, as in a different kitchen altogether. The debut article in the Spectator – he cut his recipe-writing teeth with rhubarb recipes in his local paper – is a recipe for crab and gruyère soufflé. He claims it’s the best Christmas starter he has discovered so far. Ignoring the question of whether a starter before turkey and Christmas pudding is really necessary, and disregarding the not to my mind entirely persuasive alliance of crab and strong cheese, what is really telling is the way he writes.

Cookery writing is hard. It has to be focused and practical and inspirational. It’s facts, with a bit of uplift. It involves conveying technical detail without sounding like a primary school teacher or Delia now-put-the-water-in-the-pan Smith. It needs a confident optimism that makes stoning a jar of olives seem like a good way of spending the next half hour.

With this first effort, Balls scrapes a five. The list of ingredients has the odd explosive device hidden in it. It includes a “knob of butter (35g) and the same volume of flour”. I still haven’t grasped the relationship between weight and volume, but maybe he thinks it’s never too late to learn. Then there are asides about what egg whites beaten into stiff peaks look like (peaks that are stiff) and the virtues of the electric beater over the hand whisk. This is starter-level cooking for highly qualified mathematicians.

But hey, I LOVE Ed! I love his braininess – his real new career is as an academic economist at Harvard – and his willingness to be a prat in public and the way he and Cooper seem to have worked out how to be a political couple as well as parents. I love his appetite for new things, for learning the piano as well as learning to cook.

And think of all the things he’s not doing. Not plying for hire like Jack Straw or Malcolm Rifkind, not taking the Portillo route to TV stardom (yet, anyway), not slipping seamlessly into the City on a six-figure salary. And surviving that moment of iconoclasm early on 9 May, the personification of Labour’s failure. It is tough, recovering from the “were you up for Ed Balls” moment. If a cooking column is one way of doing it, good luck with it. And Happy Christmas.