Nintendo Cooking Guide Review

When the new Nintendo Cooking Guide was launched recently for £29, some claimed that it would make the traditional cookbook forever obsolete. Given that I am something of a cookbook fetishist – there are almost as many books in our kitchen as our library – I was not an obvious candidate for conversion. But with Christmas approaching, and a mountain of cooking ahead of me, any means of getting ahead of the game was more than welcome.

The first serious hurdle was wrenching the boys’ portable Nintendo DS console from their sweaty and reluctant fists. Having eventually succeeded, I was confronted – after inserting the disc – by a cartoon chef, the animated figure that guides you through the game. He is a short, round, nursery-teacher sort of a soul, clapping his podgy hands and crooning “Well done!” as you make it to the end of each set of instructions – a weird combination of Mario and Antony Worrall Thompson.

Within half an hour, he was starting to irritate, and I wondered if it were possible to import some of the fatal lasers from my children’s favoured games. Things went better when I concentrated on his voice rather than his face: it oozed just the kind of confidence that goes down well in the kitchen. Even better, you can speed it up or slow it down to suit the pace at which you work. With only two little screens to squint at, the commentary is an indispensable part of the package. However, being able to turn off the tunes would have helped: even before I began to chop the onions, the Seventies lift music in the background was frying my brain.

If you can find a way past these drawbacks, the Cooking Guide is brilliantly easy to use. You can choose from 245 recipes, sorting by country of origin, preparation and cooking time, cooking method or ingredients (or even by excluded ingredient). You can tell it how many people you want to cook for, up to a maximum of six, and it will scale the ingredients accordingly. You can even choose a few recipes, specify how much of each you want to make, and it will make a shopping list. Now that’s nifty.

All this, of course, is controlled via the DS’s touch-screen. In other words, you need to do this bit when your hands are clean of grease, onion and flour. While I’ve come to revere the gravy splats and butter splodges that decorate my favourite cookbooks, that kind of kitchen sluttishness plays havoc with expensive electronics. So, once the recipe is chosen from the pleasingly international array – a good British shepherd’s pie, an Asian nasi goreng, Russian syrniki – Nintendo assumes your hands will not be used and activates voice control. Neat idea.

The instructions, which take a step-by-step approach our mothers were at home with four decades ago, are clear, direct and illustrated, right down to reminding you to switch on the oven. Most are pared down for a notionally “average” palate, which makes them rather bland, and there are no suggested variations: you get a red Thai curry, but no indication that you could ring the changes with green.

Admittedly, you can always pep up the recipes with a bit of imagination: there are video clips on basic cooking techniques and room to add your own notes using the DS’s plastic pencil (which should probably also be kept clean of general kitchen gloop if you don’t want to be garrotted by your 10-year-old). But here’s the rub, and it’s a big one: moving through the voice-activated instructions is haphazard, leaving me repeating – with increasing exasperation – the futile command to “continue”. Mostly, I gave up on the voice controls and left a great big kitchen-y fingerprint on the screen in an effort to finish dinner before it was time for breakfast.

My kids will hate me for sullying their shiny machine, but they will be as glad to get it back as I am to relinquish it. Although I’m struggling to limit the amount of time they spend on games, I’ve still slipped the Kitchen Guide into the case. If either of them begins to show an appetite for making dinner any time soon, then I’ll bless the day Nintendo went culinary.