Cooks and Shnooks

I love cooking shows. I love to watch cooking shows while I’m cooking. Okay, let me amend that. I love MOST cooking shows.

I pretty much signed on to cable TV to get the Rachael Ray Channel (Food Network). Since then, I’ve regretted that decision somewhat. Because now, there are cooking shows on every channel (not to mention Wretchel Ray).

It used to be that cooking shows could only be found on PBS. I remember watching Julia Child and Martin Yan back in the 80s. And that incredible goofball, Graham Kerr.

In the 90s, I would be glued to PBS most Saturday mornings and afternoons—Carlo Cooks Italian, Biba’s Kitchen . . . the Old Reliables of food shows. And that pervert Frugal Gourmet dude, who was a practicing minister who liked to practice on children. The list goes on, and grows tiresome, but I want to focus on what’s up these days—notably, America’s Test Kitchen and the Gourmet show.

Now, Cook’s Illustrated is a magazine that gets a lot of respect from me. I would qualify it as the best recipe source on the market today. That, coupled with their no-ad policy and scientific/practical approach to food and cooking just makes them head and shoulders above the Bon Appetit crowd.

The editor/founder, Christopher Kimball, writes very well (although most of his pieces, in the front of every issue, are in the aw-shucks-Elmer the Farmer vein) and his love of all things food is obvious.

Does that mean he’s a good TV host? Jesusgoddamnchrisis, GET HIM OFF THE STAGE! He’s this combover aging Boomer-type with large, inappropriate glasses, his voice is a high-pitched babble and his arms flail almost spastically every time his mouth opens. I suspect he has Parkinson’s and is trying to work it out of his system. The guy is so grating, so annoying, that you just want to SHOUT. And the rest of the crew is so dumpy, so earnest, that you just wish they’d all just crawl back into the magazine and WRITE for god’s sakes, not PERFORM like the hand-puppets they imitate.

And Gourmet? Sooo cool. So bloody cool, if you’re like, in 1993. The shaky camera, the blur-to-sharp-to-blur, the pulsing background music, the titles swishing in and out of the frame, the insanelyclosecloseups . . . it’s about as tiresome as ploughing through those “Advertiser Supplement” pages that usually make up the bulk of their magazine.

Give me Julia’s bleat or Jacques Pepin’s hyper-exaggerated French accent any day.