Friday, January 21, 2005

For the Love of Cooking Shows

Some time ago the movie industry figured out that Americans would plunk down good money for a foreign film if plenty of beautiful food got stirred into the romance. But long before steamy food films such as Tampopo and Like Water for Chocolate became art house hits, on the very day that Julia Child first deboned a tv chicken, PBS knew they were onto something tasty, and they’ve been milking that critter ever since.  Now, in 2005, you’re leading a peculiar life of luxury when you find yourself along about lunchtime on Saturday watching someone else cook on television.

Our local public station serves up this fare cafeteria style, six shows in a row.  We have the nostalgic motherly Italian chef, the groovy philosophical big city Mexican chef, the local chef and book club combo, the professional cooking school team of chefs, the cutting edge artiste chef with the big dollar restaurant, and the classically trained French chef with the down to earth style.  Short of installing cable and watching the Food Channel every hour of the day, what more could a food person want?

People who like cooking shows really like them. We like the studio lights shining off the steamy finished dishes, we like the sizzle of the saute pans, we like the carefully chosen art objects in the background.  We love the rare ingredients and the posh serving bowls; we adore the stainless pots whose mirrored surfaces shine like pennies at the mint; we want the fantasy life of the shows.  My daughter, who is only seven, has remembered for several years now a fancy dessert prepared on one of the very few cooking shows she’s ever seen.  First the chef turned a mixing bowl upside down on the table and buttered it.  Then he drizzled a caramel syrup over the surface, creating a domed lattice of interconnected strands of caramel.  When these cooled and solidified, he gently removed the caramel cage from the bowl.  He rested violet flowers on the lattice and placed the whole thing over some posh dessert he’d been making while the main dish cooked.  The caramel dome glistened, the violets were gorgeous, and general air of extravagance made us feel wealthy.  I will never make that golden dome, but who needs to? When you’re watching a cooking show, friends, life is good.

Sadly, too many of the dishes you might watch being made on tv are too difficult or time-consuming for the average burger-hound like me to think of making. Yet the chefs, each in their own ways, woo and sway and seduce and persuade and instruct and cajole.  They really want to change our lives.  They want us to cook. They want us to have the everyday wealth that good food puts within reach of most Americans, if only we were not living the sad way we do.

For each cooking show walks us up to the gates of its particular kind of earthly paradise, and urges us to come in.  That motherly chef lets the exotic sound of native Italian wash over us, immersing us in nostalgia for a traditional culture. The big city Mexican chef celebrates daring and gusto, tempting us to stretch our habits and tastes and go exploring. The local dinner and book club chef happily announces that the good life, or at least a good enough life, is right here in Michiana. The cooking school team of chefs offers the same profound and systematic competence that gave us the Model T Ford. The artiste with the posh restaurant enthuses over the rituals of combining good ingredients in beautiful new ways each day. And my favorite, Jacques Pepin, the down to earth Frenchman with the classical culinary training, has been cooking and teaching so long that he takes for granted that these skills and pleasures can be shared. He has faith in a viewer’s competence and curiosity and good will.  He wants us to know how to enjoy life a little better. He wants to teach cooking.

So there he is, braising carrots in butter and brown sugar or putting his hand into a pot to feel the doneness of a roast or stirring marmalade and liqueur into a bowl of chopped fruit or arranging a piece of fish on a plate so as to show off the beautiful grill marks.  He takes a little unscripted bite halfway through an episode, and mentions the freshness of a raw ingredient.  When I watch him cooking, I think there’s a chance these seductive shows are not about gluttony or passivity or nostalgia for a lost heritage.  Maybe instead they’re one more way to remind ourselves about knowledge and skillful possibilities in our everyday lives. 

Broadcast by Ken Smith on January 21, 2005
Arts & Entertainment • Food • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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