Quiche rating for beginners.

My wife came into the front room brandishing a quiche which she held in front of me, declaring: "Look at that. That's a corker of a quiche, that is!"

Now, don't get me wrong, it was clearly a very nice quiche - very colourful and clearly so full of healthy stuff that the loo is audibly quivering in anticipation - but how do you comment on that? How do you compare one quiche to another?

I suppose there are some quiches which are poorly turned out. Should a feta quiche be inflicted upon you by someone who hates you, it will invariably be white, powdery and disappointing.  A Quiche Lorraine can be woefully devoid of bacon and thus ill-deserving the moniker.

By contrast, a quiche may be too busy, as indeed my wife's chosen one was. It may taste wonderful but it may also just taste of loads of things which don't quite agree with each other. I don't know because I had already had my lunch. Plus, I can take or leave a quiche.

I wonder if quiche rating is a thing.  If it is, would you judge primarily on look or flavour?  I would hope that being a foodstuff, flavour would be about 90% but we do like to faff about with food these days so I imagine a beautiful yet inedible quiche would win plaudits while a homemade but mouth-wateringly delicious version would be dismissed by the quiche cognoscienti.

A travesty.

Maybe quiche rating is something you can do for a living. Maybe markets across the country are occasionally descended upon by tedious people with beards and pointlessly expensive clothing who gawp, gaze and judge baked goods based on appearance, occasionally tasting said products for quality control.

I bet there's a website for this: there's a website for everything. If there isn't, I may have found my role.  I could get all expenses trips to different parts of the country to judge quiches.  I could do missionary work to those parts of these islands which have never considered a quiche to be a legitimate foodstuff, reassuring nervous youngsters that, even though it doesn't have a lid, yes, it is still essentially a pie and therefore bad for you.  I could take quiche appreciation to other countries, lecturing in Azerbaijan on the role of quiches in European history.  "Had Marie-Antoinette had access to a ready supply of quiches, the whole course of French - and therefore European - history might have been completely different.  Alas, her baker had only the day before decided to close up and retire to a small village near to Beziers to establish a cheese business..."

Who knows, one day I could even bag a TV series with an annoying greengrocer, judging quiches on BBC2 for aspirant people who, rather than simply doing what they do best and being happy, insist on being judged by others so that they can be made to feel inadequate despite clearly being pretty amazing in their own right.

Perhaps, given my general disdain towards quiches, I should stick to what I do best.  If only I knew what that was...