Another Tory has been telling us that poor people can't cook.

This week, Lady Jenkin opined that poor people resort to food banks because they can't cook meals for themselves.

This is insulting in several ways: firstly, cooking is simple. Any able-bodied person can cook a meal. If you want to get pernickety, it's baking that's difficult, or perhaps cordon bleu cookery can be taxing, but plain old cooking is simple. It's probably easier to throw together a simple pasta sauce than it is to get the squeaky lid off a Dolmio jar.

Yes, Jenkin, the poor can cook. It's just that some of us are held back by long working hours or illness or by simple economics. A pound shop ready meal, unhealthy as it may be, will always be cheaper than a home-cooked meal.

But, the privileged will moan, a carrot costs 4p. Yes, it probably does, but to make a pot of soup with your raw penny vegetables requires more than the carrot. You also need several carrots, then the stock and an onion plus a bag of lentils to thicken the soup and make it something more than vegetable flavoured water.

And lentils can't be bought in cheap little handfuls, they have to be purchased in a big, fat bag. Then you need salt and pepper to season, plus the gas to heat, boil and simmer the soup. It costs more than 4p.

So what about the plethora of cookery programmes on TV? If poor people can't and won't cook, are these just aimed at middle-class people? Or might a poor person watch them as a posh person might watch David Attenborough on the Serengeti, marvelling at how exotic and alien it all is?

Looking at the TV chefs it'd be easy to believe they're aimed solely at the middle class. That audience, after all, are the ones who can afford to skip straight to the Waitrose website after the show and order up all the ingredients along with the chef's hardback book. Nigella is posh, Delia is posh and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's name hints at poshness you can't imagine. They're all posh and surely Mary Berry is the poshest of them all.

So, will she alienate all us ordinary people who've found ourselves forced to dine on SmartPrice noodles? Should TV promote working-class TV cooks? If that means more Jamie Oliver then no! Give me the delightfully posh Mary any day.

Mary Berry's Absolute Christmas Favourites (BBC2) is a lovely warm, quaint programme. Wearing a cosy Christmas jumper, instead of her jazzy Bake-Off blazers, she offers us her favourite Christmas recipes - fish pie, beef casserole and chocolate mousse cake - and dispenses handy hints about how to stay ahead of the Christmas kitchen chaos.

The focus throughout is on family, so if she's alienating anyone it will be single people. She constantly refers to her children gladly returning to the nest on Christmas Eve, the struggles her mother had in cooking with an old-fashioned oven - 'mum didn't have a glass door!' - and how her husband 'is a gravy man'. It's all about family and how gathering round the dinner table knits them all together.

It was all very sweet and cosy so I was relieved when she left her sunny kitchen to go to a cheese factory to watch Stilton being made. This was all noise and clamour and, I assume, appalling stink, and it was a relief from the cosy mumsiness of the kitchen segments which were nice, but perhaps just too nice. The whiff of cheese balanced things out nicely. You could say the cheese stopped it all becoming too cheesy!