There’s a good chance that you’ve eaten just a handful of truly spectacular, memorable, hard-to-obtain meals in your life. My most memorable job-related meal was in an unbelievably expensive bank vice president’s home located on the side of The Peak overlooking the rest of Hong Kong, an unbelievably pricey piece of real estate. The meal - unbelievably pricey (what are the chances?) - included a Beef Wellington appetizer and Maine lobster flown in fresh that day. FAN-CEE.
I like to remember this every so often when I’m boiling a 25-cent packet of Ramen. If you’re blessed with a cooperative imagination, you too can think of that one good steak or hamburger you had, while sipping noodle broth … and it magically tastes better. Or just stare at a Texas Roadhouse ad. Don’t ask me how it works, and don’t ruin my methods by telling me the psychology behind it.
Which is to say, bless the Food Network and the Cooking Channel.
When I could afford to sign up for cable again several years ago, among my new discoveries were “Iron Chef America” and “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.” If Julia Child and other cooking-show hosts from my childhood taught viewers specific recipes and kitchen practices, these newer shows exist chiefly as wish fulfillment. My plain cereal becomes tastier by several factors if I’m watching Pioneer Woman mix and bake walnut-infused blondie brownies, then top it with a giant scoop of homemade melting vanilla bean ice cream. The Barefoot Contessa knows just how to make vegetables drool-worthy with some olive oil and generously-sprinkled sea salt, overlaid with that calming, lulling voice.
Like Spirit Airlines and Nickelback, Guy Fieri takes a lot of good-natured cultural guff for his bleach-blond surfboy appearance and championing of deep-fried and cheese-smothered fare. What he’s really done, by all appearances - in addition to charitable works including providing meals to Californians run out of their homes by wildfires and contributing to various good works through cooks and chefs competing on “Guy’s Grocery Games” - is help call attention to a parade of small businesses across the United States. “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives” has featured about a thousand eateries in its decade-plus on the air, drawing new eaters and contributing to the food-porn visual landscape. Nothing makes my easy homemade cheeseburger taste better than eating it while watching some fry cook Guy is profiling create a grandiose and juicy sandwich.
One of my favorite Food Network shows is hosted by Valerie Bertinelli - former child actor, former wife of rocker Eddie Van Halen, and current Italian chef. I don’t pretend to know the level of actual culinary skill that actors/singers like she and Trisha Yearwood bring to their shows - it’s possible every bit of it is simply a performance memorized right before the show tapes - but Val seems like she might actually know what she’s doing in the kitchen. Her dishes are simple enough to make at home but exotic-sounding enough to justify a half-hour of airtime, and I’ve worked with enough of the ingredients that I can reasonably imagine what she’s making might taste like even if I’m actually stuck with leftover macaroni while watching the show.
Besides, I’ve never seen any cooking-show host who knows as many people (and dogs) with birthdays as Val seems to, and she preps a four-course meal for every one of them. I wonder what I could do to become her friend and rate my own lemon-blueberry tart?
Then there are the shows that make you feel better about yourself. If there’s no way in a million years you can remember a fraction of what Alton Brown knows about food chemistry, at least there’s the “Worst Cooks in America” to sort of comfort you. These are people who can char boiling water. I would say no adult is actually that bad a cook except that I’ve met a few. Watching a couple episodes of this will re-center you for the real world after indulging in the culinary Cirque du Soleil of “Iron Chef America” and its gastric-cube servings of air-blown salmon floating atop a bed of magnetized liquid nitrogen.
My only real complaint in watching the contest shows is the food waste. While other viewers have moved on to wondering how the “Chopped” chefs are going to work cherry spoon fruit and octopus into the second round, I’m still trying to figure out who gets the judges’ leftover mushroom-and-pickled-pigs-feet tamale appetizers, since they only nibbled about two bites from it. Maybe this is how the interns get paid?
-November 13, 2019