February 1999 smoking jacket by Gregory Alkaitis-Carafelli |
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Where have all the good cooks gone?
In John Brunner's 1968 future-facing novel Stand On Zanzibar, you
don't just watch television, you're inside it as well. Ingenious set-top
technology replaces the image of "Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere" in ads and
station identification slots with your image -- and that of your dream
companion, if you happen to be single. Otherwise you're stuck with your
spouse. "There you are wearing clothes you've never owned, doing things
you've never done in places you've never been, and it has the immediacy of
real life because nowadays television is the real world."
Unfortunately here we are some decades later and what's on in the real world
(i.e. not cable) is mostly cooking shows, and not good ones either. Today's
half-hour cooking program is led by second-stringers come to prime time,
ladies who for years have lurked in the shadows of Julia Child's ample bosom
and now emerge, blinking in the bright television studio light, to
demonstrate how to roll sushi ("place your nori shiny side out on your
bamboo mat. . .") and prepare chicken, squashed on the grill under a brick
wrapped in aluminum foil in the best old world style. They are not alone in
their kitchens like the masters who have gone before them; no the next
generation TV cook has instead a small legion of assistants over whom they
can lord, dividing up meal preparation into small groups and then fluttering
around the kitchen correcting, praising and pointing out how it clearly
shouldn't be done.
This isn't how I remember it; gone from the screen is the stylish and witty
Graham Kerr, who would whip up healthy meals with panache, charming
housewives in between "I Love Lucy" and "Gilligan's Island" while I lay in
bed home sick from school. And the Frugal Gourmet, Jeff Smith, who taught me
how to season a wok and make exotic yet simple twelve course meals, also
gone, and in a cloud of sexual scandal expected of authors and actors, not
chefs and Presbyterian ministers. Classic Julia Child's not dead but she
might as well be, available now only on esoteric cable channels I don't
subscribe to.
This national drought of good telegenic cooks (not chefs, just regular
cooks) is disturbing because food is such a subtle reflection of a culture's
memes and mores. Asking what is for dinner is the most truthful way of
taking the pulse of the nation. Visiting the United States in 1988, Václav
Havel was served a simple carrot and corn Risotto at a state dinner, in
keeping with the end of the McDLT-era eighties, ostentation and Styrofoam.
Later, at a dinner for President Yeltsin in 1997, the United States served
baby reindeer with mushrooms, a reminder of democracy's conquest these days
in even the most remote portions of the globe, like it or not. And flying
the Pope back to Rome from St. Louis this January, TWA served jumbo prawns
and foie gras with fresh figs for hors d'oeuvres aboard Shepherd I, part of
a menu that says plenty about organized religion and the people who grow fat
from it.
In these uncertain times television needs a crossover cooking celebrity,
someone to break out of the ivory tower of cable programming and do network
television, even if it is just UPN. (Sit down Emiril, I don't mean you.)
Especially now we need a modern-day in-the-flesh Betty Crocker or June
Cleaver to show us how to make simple meals with style and ingredients
easily procured; someone who can julienne potatoes while looking straight at
the camera; someone who can cut fat without sacrificing taste; someone who
can do it all, and with a broad smile too. Because if television is indeed
the real world, then Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere at least deserve something good
for dinner.
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