09-03-2025
Will Blue Nun and Ferrero Rocher ever escape the taint of naffness?
As the spring sunshine falls on the dust and smears of winter, minds turn to spring cleaning – but not for long.
Soon, like Mole in The Wind in the Willows, we may find ourselves saying 'Hang spring cleaning!' and heading for more convivial pursuits. Perhaps we could invite the neighbours round for a meal. But then there comes the question of what to make.
Television shows such as MasterChef and Come Dine With Me have turned cookery into an extreme sport with a rich potential for humiliation.
And like all the performing arts, food is subject to trends that change with capricious speed. Those once cherished totems of aspirational 1970s dining, prawn cocktail, chicken Kiev and baked Alaska, became objects of derision for decades before their current rehabilitation on the dinner tables of fashionable foodies, well-seasoned with cheffy irony.
Last week The Telegraph published obituaries of two brilliant innovators who created products that traced an ignominious trajectory from aspirational to naff.
Francesco Rivella, who died last month aged 97, was an Italian chemist (and friend of the chemist and author Primo Levi) who joined the confectionary firm of Ferrero, where he helped devise such globally popular delicacies as the chocolate spread Nutella and the knobbly, gold-wrapped bolus, Ferrero Rocher.
Sixty years after the first jar was sold, the appetite for Nutella remains as keen as ever. But Ferrero Rocher is indelibly associated, at least in Britain, with the notorious 1990s 'ambassador's reception' television commercial. Featuring an elderly white-gloved butler handing around a pyramid of Rochers at an Embassy party, with the punchline 'Monsieur, wizz zeez Rocher you're really spoiling us', the ad became a kitsch icon. So, alas, did the chocolates.
A 2003 remake by the filmmaker Martha Fiennes replaced the old retainer with a dashing younger model, but (perhaps unsurprisingly in a nation whose collective ear is so finely attuned to the social aspirations of Hyacinth Bucket and Margo Leadbetter) it failed to erase the indelible aura of comedy that surrounds Ferrero Rocher as firmly as its gold foil wrapping.
Peter Sichel, who died aged 102, 10 days after Rivella, had an even more remarkable career. Born into a German Jewish wine-making family, he served with the US army during the war and later joined the CIA. In 1960 he returned to the family wine-making business and began an astonishingly successful campaign to promote Blue Nun in Britain and the US.
Social anxiety played a role here, too. In markets where wine wasn't an everyday drink, the reassuring tagline: 'The delicious white wine that's correct with any dish', increased US sales by 500 per cent.
The wine became embedded in popular culture, providing impromptu percussion on the Beatles' White Album, and appearing in Jonathan Coe's novel, The Rotters' Club.
But as consumers became more fluent in winespeak, Blue Nun became a comic shorthand for lack of sophistication, its decline epitomised when Steve Coogan's hapless character, Alan Partridge, ordered a bottle at lunch with a BBC executive.
With global wine consumption down 12 per cent since 2007, and vineyards being replanted with more profitable olive trees, a renaissance in the fortunes of Blue Nun seems unlikely. But the inexorable churn in food fashion continues.
In troubled times our appetites turn from the exotic to old favourites. Data from the pandemic recorded a sharp rise in sales of instant mash, stock cubes and – of all things – suet. As global instability suggests a return to comfort food (Steve Coogan predicts 'a resurgence of white pepper' – a taste he shares with the great Simon Hopkinson), what fashionable comestibles might we consign to the recycling bin?
Personally, I'd be happy to see the disappearance of salted caramel anything, along with the ubiquitous worms of cacio e pepe, and small plates – those stingy restaurant elevations of generous bar snacks (tapas, cicchetti) into an indigestible approximation of a meal.
But even if they were to vanish, the chances are that eventually, they'd be back. As the film critic David Thomson remarked of Beverley's supposedly gauche (but now quite acceptable) chilling of a bottle of Beaujolais in Mike Leigh's play, Abigail's Party, 'the gaffe has turned suave'.
