As featured on our YouTube channel
Liz Nicholls chats to the thoroughly entertaining anarchist cook, comedian & dad George Egg who will star at Big Feastival in Kingham this coming bank holiday weekend
Q. Hello George. Lovely to talk to you, our snack hacker! Are you looking forward to Big Feastival?
“Yeah, I’m really excited, it’s my second time. I’m doing a cookery demo and a stand-up set both on the same day [Sunday].”
Q. And can you tell us a bit about your shows for those who haven’t seen you live? “So in theatre show, I cook on stage, live… real cooking as well, not some sort of clowny gesture towards it, it’s decent stuff! But the twist is that I don’t have any conventional kitchen equipment; I cook with power tools and things like a laptop that I’ve converted for cooking on. I’ve got a sort of flame-thrower thing, a wallpaper stripper and I cook three plates of food the audience can try. I’m also the Snack Hacker. And my stand-up is straight stand-up… but with props!”
Images by: Matt Lincoln
Q. Who were your comedy influences when you were younger? “Laurel and Hardy! Not just when I was younger, now as well. I also love lots of comedians including James Acaster.”
Q. So your first Edinburgh show, How To Cook in a Hotel Room was in 2015? “Yeah, that’s right. It was a totally self-produced show, not even any posters, and it sold out! I toured that for a couple of years then I realised I’d created this niche which led to more shows, using power tools and stuff!”
Q. Are you surprised how popular it’s been and what amazing fans you’ve picked up along the way?
“Yeah, I’m really surprised. I mean, I’m wracked with self-doubt! I think the success comes down to the fact that it is unique. And it comes from a real genuine passion. I love cooking, I love being inventive and creative…”
Q. And do you think we could all maybe go a little bit more rogue, like you, with our cooking?
“Yeah! If you kind of look at cooking as art you should be creative and break rules and challenge convention!”
Q. Like me you’re thinking about food pretty much every waking thought… what would your last supper be? “Crikey. Do you know what, I need to figure out before next week what my favourite last supper is. I’m writing a cookbook at the moment, and I’m crippled by choice, always. There’s a lot of nostalgic stuff in there because my dad did all the cooking when we were kids. And there’s loads of things that he did that bring everything flooding back. He used to make this lemonade with a whole lemon and ice cubes and sugar and a liquidiser…”
Q. What were your school dinners like? “Oh, I’ve such fond memories of school dinners! I went to school in south-east London, and they had this tuck shop, basically, all the things that they couldn’t sell. There’d be lukewarm fish fingers and sausages and things, which they’d sell for 5p, 10p. It was lethal! I’d go there towards the end of the lunch hour and just have like, eight fish fingers.”
Q. And what I really like about you is that you don’t have any sort of notion of guilty pleasures… Everything’s a pleasure! There’s never this snobbery about food that you sometimes get. “Yeah, oh, utterly. I mean, that’s my kind of ethos certainly with the Snack Hacker stuff. I don’t feel like salad cream is a naff ingredient: personally I call it white ketchup. I mean, it’s very similar; it’s full of vinegar and sugar. We didn’t have salad cream when I was growing up. We were quite a middle-class family and my parents frowned on salad cream like they frowned on ITV. So at school, I got a sachet of salad cream and had that with fish fingers. I was like, oooh, in heaven.”
Q. You’ve got some great fellow foodie famous fans haven’t you? “I mean, yeah, well, Craig Charles has really taken me under his wing. That’s lovely. So I do this weekly chat with him on BBC 6 Music every Monday where I give him a sort of quick, easy recipe idea. He’s so positive! I mean, every idea I come up with, he’s like ‘oh, God, I want to eat that’. Gennaro Contaldo too; I just I love him: he’s so funny, he reminds me of that Laurel & Hardy era.”
Q. What’s your favourite bit of kitchen kit? “A pressure cooker is something I discovered in the last few years. The recipes you can do! Check out the book by Catherine Phipps: you can do like a joint of roast beef in something like five minutes and it’s perfect, pink in the middle. It’s incredible! Otherwise, a microwave! We didn’t get one until after my dad had died but it’s amazing. You can do all sorts like chicken crackling and stuff which is just heaven.”
Q. You’ve got a cookbook coming out soon, haven’t you, as well as your theatre shows this autumn?
“Yeah, that’s being published June next year, see you at Big Feastival for a taste!”
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