Rahul!
Bake Off is the ideal moving wallpaper for when you've given the world everything you've got to give that day; and when the cake of someone you especially like fails you can cry if you want — and even if you don't want.
Mandal on relationship advice and Great British Bake Off’s highs and lows
The Times August 27 2019
From pre-show nightmares to why romance is off the cards: 2018’s winner tells Helen Rumbelow what the new bakers will experience
Rahul Mandal: “I don’t feel ready for a romantic partner — I’m only 32” Jay Brooks
When you meet Rahul Mandal, last year’s Great British Bake Off champion, you have to allot some time to deal with how Rahul he is. I’m in a King’s Cross station café in London, waiting for his train from Rotherham. I know everyone loves to fuss over his childlike purity, his love of a wholesome glass of milk, how he wears a Christmas jumper every day in December, but really I’m thinking: television constructs caricatures. Mandal is a serious nuclear research scientist, who has, alone, built a life far from his native India. In short, more capable than most 32-year-olds. He is a man, not a teddy.
And then he turns up. Dinky — he has lost the 8kg he put on during the competition — and carrying in front of him an enormous raspberry and lemon traybake he decided to make for me the night before. The trouble is, the café table is too small, so he says he will cradle the tin on his lap for the next hour. There follows a flurry of awkwardness: his order to the waitress of “just tap water, please”, as if a tea will inconvenience her; his apologies for the trouble his gift has caused — “I worried about doing it”; my wrestling the cake on to the seat between us. He might as well have stood on the station concourse with a tag: “Please look after this bear.”
“Food,” he says, and will say again in different ways, “is love.”
Rahul Mandal with the Bake Off judges Paul Hollywood and Prue LeithMARK BOURDILLON/PA
When Mandal was crowned winner of the ninth series of Bake Off on Channel 4 last autumn, he became its first non-British winner, and also, with the immigrant’s fervour, its truest evangelist. For him, _Bake Off _is not a cosy reality TV show built on toppling biscuit towers, it is something like religion. It offers up signature bakes not to the pair of judges, but to the twin gods of kindness and kinship. “We make mistakes and we learn from mistakes. _Bake Off _shows how to be a nice human.”
Mandal was up late the night before we meet, waiting until the names of this year’s contestants were announced, then messaging them on Instagram to say they can call on him for help during the scrutiny that is about to hit them. He knows how daunting the experience can be. This time last year he had nightmares each night about how _Bake Off _would affect him — he regards himself a bit like their big brother now.
“I never had a brother or a sister, now I feel they are part of the _Bake Off _family,” he says. “Obviously things have changed a lot for me in the past year. That was a guy who was awake the whole night to see his name in the newspaper.”
Now he has more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, has performed on various TV shows and would have written a cookbook, like so many of the show’s other stars, if only he wasn’t intimidated by all the other cookbooks. “I’m trying to answer the question of why people would buy my book when there are so many nice books out there.”
This year’s Bake Off contestantsMARK BOURDILLON/PA
He still works at the Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre in Rotherham, South Yorkshire (he’s an engineer, improving the safety of nuclear power plants). I ask if, during his nine years of living in the UK, he has experienced racism.
“No, not at all,” he says emphatically, and he has experienced no change in that since the Brexit referendum three years ago. The first day he moved to Rotherham he went to Tesco, and the women on the checkout were so warm he started going every day. They would advise him: “Today’s the football day, there’ll be some crazy people, don’t go out after three.” He began to take them his bakes — “they really loved it” — and then baked for his fellow commuters on the No 72 bus and at the leisure centre. He found “many mums”, but still got “very nervous talking to new people face to face”.
Social media, which he got into after his Bake Off series finished, has expanded his social horizons. “Instagram helped me a lot, [to learn] that talking to new people is not scary. It gives me the courage to speak up, open up. Probably I wouldn’t be talking to you like this if I didn’t have Instagram for the past eight months.”
Much has been made of how the new set of _Bake Off _contestants are younger and cooler than ever. Seven of the group of 13 are in their twenties, most of them have Instagram followings. But Mandal was different. He tells me he has struggled with isolation his entire life.
He cried so much when he first started school that the family doctor signed him off. Finally, he made it to class, “under one condition”: that his mother would sit next to him, which went on for three months. He finally agreed she could leave the classroom, as long as she sat outside the door.
Mandal describes himself as the “chubby, scared boy who never had friends”. He didn’t do the usual socialising at cinemas and cafés “as there was no one to go with”. He stayed at home during his undergraduate and master’s degrees, by this time winning prizes and scholarships for his first-class work, until his decision to come, alone, to the UK for a PhD. Couldn’t you, I suggest, have tried moving round the corner first? His pouf of hair bobs in agreement. “The family were shocked: I’d never spent a night away from them. It was a crazy decision.”
Yet his psyche needs extreme measures to help him to unstick himself. “I mean, can you imagine me applying for Bake Off? Probably not, in the same way.”
Travelling to Loughborough in Leicestershire involved his first plane journey — he drank coffee to keep warm and arrived “super-hyped”. It was a snowy December day and “it made me genuinely feel the true colour and cold touch of loneliness”, he recently wrote on Instagram. That first night in his flat near Loughborough University, “I sat on the floor and cried for so long it almost made me numb”. Watching _Bake Off _was a lifeline. He saw wonders on screen, like his first meringue.
His mother, conforming to Indian mum stereotype, is a feeder: cooking was caring. But in Britain, he says, baking is our love language. “It tickles the memory of your mother, your grandmother, baking for you. It is that ‘blankety’, wrapping feeling that you need when you are not feeling well or you’re upset.” That, he says, is very similar to the warmth of welcome in Britain.
“You know, watching _Bake Off _is similar to the feeling of this supermarket lady, being so caring. It’s something to hold on to on your hard days. Even me, if I have a bad day, I come back and watch one of the episodes from my series or the series before. It helps me.”
It is in this context that he knows the value of kindness. He venerates Bake Off, but his one criticism is the cruelty of weekly evictions. He wishes that all could stay and be ranked at the end. “Nothing wrong in that, I always said it, but nobody listened to me.”
Raised as a Hindu, he believes in a universal God across all religions: he holds his glass of tap water to the light and gives me a parable of the water as God, the glass as any given faith. When he talks like this, I say he sounds . . . “Stupid?” he supplies. No, I say: like a kind of homespun guru.
“Some people on Instagram say my posts are full of this stuff, kindness. But I don’t care. Life is too short not to be nice.”
And boy, has he embraced Christmas: for him an exciting mash-up of baked goods and goodness. He says he missed out on Christmas for 23 years and makes up for it now. He will host a Christmas Eve dinner for waifs like him, followed by a trip to church, and on Christmas Day he likes to watch Harry Potter wearing his Pikachu onesie and “surprise” himself with his own presents. Recently he volunteered at a homeless shelter. “That was my first two-tier cake.”
When he appeared on The Jonathan Ross Show, next to the worldly actors Rob Lowe and Gillian Anderson (he had never heard of them and googled them on the way to the studio), his naivety gave him the appearance of staying up past bedtime. Ross asked him to read from a “sex dice” with different body parts written on it. He could only manage to say “neck”. What were the parts he refused to say? “I thought, ‘I’m not going to say it.’ I mean it’s probably not dodgy for other people, but I can’t see myself saying those words.”
Mandal occasionally appears in YouTube videos, answering questions from fans. One woman asked: “Why are you such a babe?” Do you think you’re a babe, I ask. “I don’t even know the meaning of that,” he says. But you get quite a bit of romantic attention online, I say. “Really?” he yelps, in panic. I don’t think he notices. He has always been single, and he laughs when people ask for relationship advice. “Me?” he says with a chuckle. For now, he is not even thinking about it.
“I would like to have a family at some point. Um, obviously a family does start with a romantic partner, but I don’t feel ready for that at the moment. I’m only 32.”
Of course, his “mum thinks that’s too late”, but Mandal knows he is a slow developer. “It took quite a lot of time for me to open up to what I want to do.” With the younger crowd on _Bake Off _this year, does he think the producers are hoping to cook up some romance? “Trust me, that’s the last thing you think of in the _Bake Off _tent,” he says.
“Remember that even though there are only about 50 people in the tent, each contestant knows very well that the whole nation is going to see them. So they’re already stressed. No need to add any of the stress regarding flirting, there is just no opportunity.”
Contestants do not see the shows before transmission. But, Mandal says, no one’s true character is more exposed than when under_ Bake Off_ pressure. “It is a very honest depiction.” What a relief that this year he can just enjoy it, with a home-baked cake and other researchers from the lab.
“If you think about those weekends, cameras on each person, filming hundreds of hours, edited down to one hour. I was so scared every time I watched. You just have to hold your friends’ hands tight,” Mandal says.
He wants to expand on his work as an ambassador for Stem, which encourages young people to engage in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. He was surprised, moving from India, where science subjects are quite gender-balanced, to see fewer women in science in Britain.
“In India it is very equal. It’s very unfair to compare two different countries. But I was surprised. In a mechanical engineering lecture here, it’s probably 80 per cent male. That needs to change; you can’t encourage girls enough. You can’t leave out 50 per cent of the population if you want to see progress for a country.”
He likes working in the nuclear industry: “We need to go for renewable energy, and that is an option for it.” Is he worried about climate change? “Yes, of course.”
He does not have a driving licence and doesn’t want one — “it’s a simple way to help the environment”. We all have it “in our hands” to do more to help, he says. “I think a lot of times we think about ourselves too much. I think we need to think about others a little bit more.”
Before I go, he asks me to taste his cake. I put one spoonful of deliciousness in my mouth, and before I can say how amazing it is he starts to fret. “I’m so sorry,” he says. “Just tell me how to improve it. I’m getting very nervous.” The more he, the Bake Off champion, casts me as the expert, the more I get a bubble of hysteria in my throat and can’t swallow. This only makes him wring his hands the more in shame. We carry on like this for a few seconds.
“Is it too sweet?” he asks.
It is very sweet, Rahul. But we need all the sweetness we can get.