Mark my words Waitrose: Pippa Middleton is box office poison

Holy haddock soufflés! Pippa Middleton, everyone’s favourite half-baked food author, has just become the new face of Waitrose. How on earth could this have happened? The sister of the Duchess of Cambridge (big clue there), whose previous number one claim to fame was being a bridesmaid and bending over nicely, has been signed up to write a column for Waitrose Kitchen, the upmarket supermarket’s monthly magazine.
She will appear on the front of the magazine’s April issue, when the column will first be unveiled to a panting nation, desperate for any new tips on how to serve breakfast in bed (use a tray) or the correct method of serving tea at a tea party.
‘The teabags should go into a pot, rather than individually in mugs,’ is her previously published advice. She adds that loose-leaf tea is less practical and only connoisseurs (‘like my tea-loving brother’) notice the difference. Lower orders please note, drinking from the saucer is never acceptable. 

 

Not something to Celebrate: Pippa's book had poor sales

Pippa has promised that her new engagement is ‘an exciting opportunity to share my own passion for food and entertaining and I can’t wait to get started’.
To this end, her new monthly column will be called Pippa’s Friday Night Feasts and will share her ‘exclusive’ tips and recipes on how to celebrate the start of the weekend with friends in style.


OK. Big problem right there. Surely most Waitrose shoppers start the weekend by crawling home from work exhausted, with barely the strength left to uncork a bottle of Chateau D’Espair and shout at the kids.
Just taking a wild guess here, but perhaps the last thing millions of supermarket customers need by 8pm on a Friday is some glossy, rich, well-connected socialite fresh from the slopes of Zermatt — via a winter beach holiday in Mustique — telling them to set up a martini bar in the corner of the sitting room for guests, then head to the kitchen to debone some cod loins to make a fish pie for them. As if.
Pippa’s a really sweet girl, but she always looks like she might swoon away in a dead faint if ever presented with a dirty saucepan or an unpeeled grape. For the classic Waitrose shoppers — those post-family older couples, the working parents, the 45-plus women who love Waitrose more than life itself and peruse its well-stocked aisles nearly every day (or is that just me?) — it’s all rather insulting.
How much more can we take? The hard-working, budget-stretched, economically battered, horsemeat-eating hordes just might find that being lectured on the finer points of table placement and party nibbles by 29-year-old Miss Middleton is one indignity too far.
For since she first appeared in butter satin at the royal wedding in 2011, Pippa Middleton has struck absolutely no one as the kind of girl who is always in the kitchen at parties.

 

 

 

Since she first appeared in butter satin at the royal wedding in 2011, Pippa Middleton has struck absolutely no one as the kind of girl who is always in the kitchen at parties

Driving through Paris with gun-toting playboys, a regular fixture at society weddings, a seasoned skier on the Swiss slopes? Hate to say it, but her jet-set lifestyle always suggests that the only thing Pippa ever really makes for dinner are restaurant reservations.
Yet despite this, Waitrose is promoting her as ‘a woman with a wealth of experience of entertaining’, but that is fooling nobody. Marie Antoinette had a wealth of experience of entertaining. So do Silvio Berlusconi, Hannibal Lecter and Posh Spice, but no one is asking them for tips on prawn cocktails, herb garnishes and napkin folding any time soon.

'Undaunted by the Celebrate setback, Pippa's emergence as the face of Waitrose shows she is determined to be the new domestic goddess no matter what'

P-Middy as a food columnist? This is just the kind of news to make you choke on a cup of parsnip soup espresso, the recipe for which is on page 130 of Pippa’s steaming great floperoo of a book, Celebrate.
Despite the royal sister-in-law being given a reputed £400,000 advance by publishers Penguin last year, Celebrate will surely go down in history as the guide to entertaining that failed to entertain. 
Indeed, its very failure seemed to suggest that the British public were entirely resistant to the notion of a pampered nobody cashing in on her royal connections by exhorting them to make tissue-paper pom-poms at Christmas and spinach roulades for picnics. Whatever the culinary opposite of cat nip is, she is it.
Despite a great deal of interest and a lovely serialisation in a Sunday newspaper, the 416-page Celebrate sold only a few thousand copies, while Pippa’s infantile instructions and pedestrian writing became a laughing stock. Some of her most elementary tips on entertaining have already become the stuff of legend, including her urgings to build a bonfire for Bonfire Night, store cakes in an airtight tin to keep them fresh and serve baked potatoes ‘with a fork’.
To this we can add more gems, such as the Pippa-patented correct method to slice a sandwich with a bread knife (‘with a single up and down cutting motion’), how to make macaroons (‘quite a fiddle, I recommend buying them from a good bakery’), while her tip for ending a romantic Valentine’s evening a deux is to ‘switch off the television to play cards or a board game’.

 

Suitable replacement? Pippa's new role comes after Delia Smith parted ways with Waitrose

No wonder she’s still single!
However, undaunted by the Celebrate setback, Pippa’s emergence as the face of Waitrose shows she is determined to be the new domestic goddess no matter what.
Make no mistake, Pippa’s mission creep is under way, ounce by ounce, slice by slice, inch by column inch. Recently, there have been some subtle but strategic developments on her make-me-a-star front.

WHO KNEW?
Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course was published in 1982 and has sold more than two million copies worldwide

On the Middleton family’s Party Pieces website, the company has started using Pippa’s name and image to promote key products. That’s a first.
And note that Miss Middleton appears on the Waitrose scene just weeks after Delia Smith quit her high-profile, two-year association with the company.
So as one stately galleon sails through the Waitrose exit doors into the cookery sunset, trailing cranberry and nutmeggy fumes in her wake, she is replaced by a sleek-bodied royal-ish yacht with no mileage on the clock but plenty of pep in her engine. Vrooom!
To date, Pippa’s only credentials seem to be a stint at a party planning company in London, where she claims to have worked ‘for three years’.
She also undertook a four-week essential cookery course at The Grange cookery school in Somerset, a place which specialises in turning out cooks for ‘chalets and galleys’.
Course instructor Jane Averill remembers Pippa as a student who was ‘hard-working, smiley and lovely’ and whose menu planning suggestions were ‘more than nice’.

 

Cover star: The Duchess of Cambridge's sister will have a regular column in the supermarket magazine

To be fair to Pippa, this does make her slightly more qualified than both Nigella and Delia combined when they started out on their foodie path to fame — although Delia did have the grace to work her way up and unstoppable Nigella was blessed with originality, style and wit.

 

  

In contrast, mouse-like Pippa has yet to speak in public and her advice for home entertaining (‘buy a bunch of fresh flowers for a side table’) make her not much more than a chalet girl with connections. Yet what does that matter?
A number of cooking stars are mere figureheads; attractive personalities who have a vague grasp of cooking techniques but who manage to form themselves into a lucrative foodie brand, shored up by home economics experts who dream up and test their ‘exclusive’ recipes.
So it is hard to believe for a second that, in between holidays, Pippa Middleton dreamed up, conceived and tested the myriad recipes in her own book, including ones for pork terrine, potted shrimps, simnel cake, salmon and prawn pillows, Cornish pasties, haggis croustades, ice cream sandcastle cake and the rest.
However, this is only the beginning. Can a TV career be far behind? Pippa is given to never looking into the camera and gazing off into the distance.
That doesn’t bode well. Neither does her discreet reticence to spill the borlotti on the royal eating habits, which is of course her unique selling point.
Exactly when can we expect some juicy revelations about what the Queen puts in her shepherd’s pie and what Kate and William enjoy for supper? 
In her column, Pippa Middleton will have to prove that she has something more than royal connections and a pretty smile to fall back on.
She will have to demonstrate she is an interesting personality with something contemporary and fresh to say every month about food and entertaining.
Until then, she remains defined by what she is not, rather than what she is. Which is not a chef, not an expert and not really to be taken seriously.