As a child, I was allowed to watch as much television on Saturday and Sunday mornings as I pleased. I monopolised the living room, watching American sitcoms until 11.30am, when my mother would enter the room with a notepad and pen and ask me to change the channel so she could watch her favourite food programme. I would be exasperated. There are few things more tedious to a nine-year-old than a French cookery show: it took the presenter half an hour to painstakingly demonstrate how to properly cook a rabbit or marinate mussels – dishes that a fussy young eater like myself would never have touched, not even under threat of dessert deprivation.
And so I (reluctantly) grew up surrounded by the recipes of old-school chefs such as Maïté, a brusque, no-nonsense woman who excelled at the most gruesome demonstrations (such as how to kill live eels – be warned, the video is not for the faint-hearted) and "real food for everyone" activist Jean-Pierre Coffe, who once hurled factory-made Knacki sausages at his audience during a live TV appearance, while shouting his most famous quote: "C'est de la merde!"
Those French cookery programmes had many things in common: always aired around midday, they focused on the art of demonstration, were chock-full of practical tips and always treated (non-factory made) food with great reverence; fresh produce was the star. The tone was often stern and serious, with a clear teacher-to-student flavour. Most importantly, it was understood that French families already had at least one keen cook per household, so there was no space for pedagogic tricks aimed at luring viewers into picking up a saucepan in the first place; you only ever watched those shows if you wanted to learn how to execute specific recipes from scratch later (hence the notepad and the pen).
All those televisual memories came back flooding last week when I read Michael Pollan's extraordinary piece about American cooking, Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch. In it, he revisits the legacy of America's most famous 1960s TV chef Julia Child, ponders the rise of the Food Network channel, and dissects the popularity of recent food programmes, most of which have nothing to do with food preparation and everything to do with foodtainment – entertainment shows featuring charismatic chefs, during which the audience learns nothing. In other words, current cooking shows aren't about food as we understood it a decade ago; they're just reality shows that happen to deal with restaurants. Pollan summarises better than I could:
We learn things watching these cooking competitions, but they're not things about how to cook. There are no recipes to follow; the contests fly by much too fast for viewers to take in any practical tips; and the kind of cooking practised in prime time is far more spectacular than anything you would ever try at home (…) the implicit message of today's prime-time cooking shows is, Don't try this at home. if Julia took the fear out of cooking, these shows take the fear – the social anxiety – out of ordering in restaurants.
When I moved to the UK a few years ago, I was amazed by the number of food-related slots during prime-time TV – something almost unheard of in France. I'll admit I like watching Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall feed his pigs and enter local chutney-making competitions, and I think Kitchen Nightmares is mildly enjoyable. But the distinction must be made: they're not cooking programmes – they're food-related entertainment shows. Whatever happened to passing on knowledge and making people want to try their hand at making paella, rather than having us passively watch Gwyneth Paltrow eating one?
There are many things to be excited about as the UK culinary scene explodes with new converts, fresh ideas and chefs desperate to get "the nation" to skip yet another fast-food meal. But the vast majority of those shows, with a few exceptions (Jamie At Home, Nigella Express, and Delia come to mind), do not teach you, hands-on, how to cook. Prime-time programmers seem to prefer formats in which skills and sensory pleasures are underplayed, and the bickering between participants amplified. As a result, cooking from scratch isn't demystified, but remains unattainable, intimidating and the preserve of the middle classes – who turn to blogs and online forums for all their recipe needs.
Jamie's Ministry of Food was a great attempt to address the intersection between class and food politics, but the show sadly felt more like a documentary than something designed to coach you to start using kitchen utensils. Perhaps the right formula, blending instructional cooking content for beginners and plain-old good fun (and Ramsay's Cookalong was promising on that front) hasn't been given a good enough push by programmers.
In the meantime, the question remains: how are people going to get off their couches and into their kitchens if they are berated because they don't know how to cook, but never actually shown how to do it?
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