Food fight! The celebrity chef cult

BY JAMES CROOT

Today's food programmes seem more focused on the chefs than the food. Has entertainment displaced education?

All those Kiwis bemoaning the antics and airtime afforded to Gordon Ramsay and his competitors should remember that we only have ourselves to blame. After all, we helped create the cult of the celebrity chef.

If we hadn't allowed Graham Kerr on to our screens in 1959, The Galloping Gourmet and its template of cooking as entertainment might never have happened.

Before Kerr, television cooking was dominated by what Spiked's Patrick West describes as "dry, didactic, information-led shows" where a "meticulous breakdown of the recipe was the core".

Thanks to Kerr, cooking shows today are about characters who employ food for various themes, says West.

"There's the ersatz sporting competition, such as Masterchef, and Ready, Steady, Cook; the travelogue, with food as the excuse to go travelling and explore the world's cultures, as personified by Rick Stein; the historical study, as with Giles Coren and Sue Perkins in The Supersizers; soft-porn innuendo, personified by Nigella Lawson; or discovering American culture (while surreptitiously sneering at it), as Jamie Oliver does in his latest series, following in the footsteps of Louis Theroux."

While it's true that Julia Child beat Kerr in the race to be America's first celebrity television chef by about six years, her show The French Chef was still essentially the dissection of a recipe, believes Kathleen Collins, the American author of Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows.

"Where Child's studio was quiet except for the splat of, say, a sole fillet hitting a hot skillet, cracking of chicken bones or her pleasant chirruping, Kerr's set was home to the first in-studio audience and the first to have a hidden camera trained on the audience.

The show opened with the snappily dressed, British dandy (and) ball of energy leaping over a tall kitchen chair while holding a full glass of wine, setting the tone for the rest of the episode and raising the bar for almost every cooking show that followed."

But more than just a how-to or an amusement, cooking shows are also unique social barometers, believes Collins.

"Their legacy corresponds to the transition from women at home to women at work, from eight-hour to 24/7 work days, from cooking as domestic labour to enjoyable leisure, and from clearly defined to more fluid gender roles.

As the role of food changed from mere necessity to a means of self-expression and a conspicuous lifestyle accessory, the aim of cooking shows shifted from education to entertainment, showing viewers not simply how to cook but how to live."

University of Otago professor of anthropology and author of The Pavlova Story, Helen Leach, says New Zealand's first cooking shows, involving Alison Holst, Graham Kerr and Hudson and Halls, seem to exemplify this transition from education to entertainment.

"However, the transition has never been total. Since then we have had a blend or continuum.

"I don't think following a recipe from beginning to end during a show has ever been possible given the time constraints of television. That is why there have always been recipe leaflets, or magazines, or books by the demonstrators to provide the extra detail. Nowadays you can go online for Nigella's recipes and those of many other TV cooks. The purpose of the show is to demonstrate preparation techniques and persuade the viewer that they too can make the dish."

Describing herself as selective about what she will watch, Leach says she finds time for Jamie Oliver in his garden, Rick Stein in the Mediterranean and the River Cottage series. "All of these are informative, thoughtful and display a social conscience. I generally avoid chefs playing up as prima donnas."

Bemoaning the rise of super- celebrity shows, Leach believes the public still appreciate educational programmes like Oliver's and Stein's. "Perhaps it is the television bosses who feel we deserve only shows where cooks are humiliated."

University of Otago food science lecturer and registered dietician Janet Mitchell believes the different forms of food show attract different audiences.

"Serious cooks are more likely to watch an educational show and if the recipe is readily available in a written source, they may try it as they have more time to ponder it; whereas those that want entertainment watch TV for a food fix but are more likely to visit a restaurant to sample a dish than cook it themselves."

She cites Jamie Oliver, Jo Seagar and even the infomercial Food in a Minute as examples of television cooking shows that are easy to follow. "The Food in a Minute recipes also work. My students have tried many of them out."

But despite the popularity of the likes of Ramsay, Oliver and co, Mitchell thinks that dishes on New Zealand cooking shows are more likely to appeal and be tried at home.

"That's because the ingredients are likely to be easily available and the dishes might have a form that is recognisable as part of a Kiwi meal."

Cuisine magazine food editor and president-elect of the New Zealand Guild of Food Writers, Lauraine Jacobs, is a firm believer that cooking shows have become entertainment rather than educational.

"Julia [Child] was the original star as she introduced French cooking to Americans who, up until that point, thought that cooking was adding a can of mushroom soup and/or chicken broth to the basics and, voila, a meal. And yet her honesty also made her hugely entertaining and funny.

"One of the biggest current stars is Emeril Lagasse who has a huge following but his shows are mostly personality driven and his 'wham, bam!' just adds to the theatre.

"There's also a whole raft now of stars spawned by The Food Network in New York; the likes of Mario Batali, Bobby Flay, Tyler Florence, Aaron Sanchez who can cook, but the theatre of what they do is more important than their recipes."

Jacobs says she believes the British are better at food television as education than the Americans.

"Rick Stein, Hugh Fearnley- Whittingstill and, of course, Jamie Oliver are real teachers, but as for Gordon Ramsay, he's more like a rock star."

She finds it most interesting that those who have made the big time now are all male.

"Yet it was Julia that broke the ground for them."

Julia takes the cake on big screen

Nigella Lawson might be more alluring, but no- one compares to Julia Child when it comes to TV chefs.

An imposing 188cm with a haughty Katherine Hepburn- esque accent, she was first to turn on-screen cooking into performance art.

Part of the joy was her shows in the 60s and 70s were recorded live. They included all her on-air mishaps: breaking a sponge and the too-vigorous use of a blowtorch on a baked alaska. She accepted that making mistakes was part of cooking. And she thought on her feet to rescue dishes.

While I can't claim the fanaticism of Julie Powell, who cooked her way through the entire Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a single year, Childs galvanised me to create my most ambitious culinary creation - an orange Bavarian creme - at just age 14.

I undertook the recipe step by step to produce the perfect gelatinous, creamy creation. Her instructions made it almost foolproof, although I avoided consuming as much orange liquor as she did while making it, as I noted how much she listed wildly across the set after her second large dram.

* Julia Child's The French Chef series begins screening again on Food TV from this Saturday, 3pm.

- © Fairfax NZ News