Point of View
Cooking shows keep recipes confusing
By Carl Heintze
Making some pasta the other night I began to wonder what would happen if I did not use extra virgin oil olive. Or, if I didn't dust it with freshly ground black pepper. Or a variety of other ingredients prescribed by the haute cuisine chefs who hang out these days on television.
Everyone, I suppose, loves cooking shows. They must. There are so many of them. Some of them have become icons: Julia Child, for instance, and Jacques Pepin, who has the phoniest French accent I have heard in a long time. He must practice it on weekends.
But these two, who have joined forces over the past couple of seasons--mostly, I would guess because Julia is doing well at 85-plus to stand up, let alone cook--are just the tip of the iceberg, or more likely the handle of the cooking spoon.
Fortunately, too, so we might not have to listen to Jacques' daughter, Claudine, who appears not to have learned a thing from her father. (He seems to know this. He doesn't trust her with much of anything except words such as "Yeah" or "Oh.")
There are various versions of an Italian kitchen, ranging from a New World wise guy who cooks the way his Old Country parents taught him, to an Italian who is really Italian, so Italian you can't understand much of what he says.
There's a dessert expert. There's Jane Weir, who once worked for the woman that started all this, Alice Waters, and who allegedly cooks in the wine country, presumably the Napa Valley. But I doubt it.
There are the three barbecue chefs, one of whom arrives in an RV and appears to have eaten too much of his own cooking. There is the jolly Englishman, or maybe he is Scot, who catches his own fish and then races through his recipes (with extra virgin oil, of course). You couldn't keep up with him, if you tried.
I have lost track of some others, including Jeff Smith, the person who once was the Frugal Gourmet. He got into trouble unrelated to cooking and prudently decided to go back to the Pacific Northwest trees where he came from.
Narcai David and his friend press on, however. They are doing cookout recipes, although a lot of them don't seem to have much to do with cooking out. And as a lot of cooking shows, they interrupt one another so you can't keep track of the ingredients in the recipes, even the extra virgin olive oil and the freshly ground black pepper.
That's true of several other TV cooks. Amy Coleman, who has a guest chef with her most of the time, keeps interrupting and snatching things out of her guest's hands, fearfully, perhaps, that she will be upstaged.
These semi-understandable shows are the way they are for a reason, though, it is my belief. It is because the TV chefs don't really want to tell you how to put a recipe together.
Rather, they want you to buy their cookbooks which usually appear at the end of the broadcast for a modest $25 or so. I must confess I have fallen for this several times. I've got several of Jacques,' including his first, and, of course, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which made Julia famous, and which was a cooking bible in the '60s.
Never made any of Julia's recipes from either of the two books she and her associates wrote, not even with extra virgin olive oil or freshly ground black pepper. They're too full of cholesterol and too complicated.
I would confess to having done several of Jeff Smith's, however, despite whatever transgressions he may or may not have carried out. It doesn't seem to me that he was as doctrinaire about olive oil as some TV chefs. You might have been able to get away with just plain virgin olive oil with him. Not without freshly ground black pepper, however.
Jeff was forever hauling out his brass Turkish coffee grinder--in which, of course, he ground his pepper and he was wont to suggest you might do the same. Presumably you had to go to Turkey to get a grinder.
For a while he was very rigidly in favor of garlic presses and/or chopping one's garlic just before using it. But as time wore on (or perhaps things worsened in the Northwest for him) he slipped somewhat and actually took to using prepared and bottled garlic.
You can't get away with that with most TV chefs of the haute cuisine, however. Garlic properly chopped is as important as extra virgin olive oil and freshly ground black pepper.
Of course, I have not yet dealt with freshly ground coffee from Sumatra, Kenya, Costa Rica or some other exotic port of call or wine. Coffee, which made Starbucks a household word, needs another essay.
Wine is a whole other subject, even more esoteric than extra virgin olive oil.
My own personal belief, however, is that, like olive oil, wine is wine and the subtleties of taste are as vastly exaggerated as the proliferation of television cooks.
Scrambled eggs, anyone?
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
