I do a lot of the cooking in our house, and over time I’ve accumulated a stable of staples—recipes that are easy to make and don’t provoke major grumbling from anyone in the household.
My wife is a more confident cook, experimental and daring; her tendency to make extemporaneous improvements to recipes can be the culinary equivalent of an improvisation by Miles Davis or John Coltrane, or the recital of third graders new to their instruments, who’ve lost track of the tune. As with the jazz greats and the third graders, every performance is unique, and since my wife rarely makes note of the changes she’s made, every recipe is promptly lost to history, for better or worse. One might say she’s following in the footsteps of her late grandmother, who, although she was more diligent about recording her cooking process on paper, tended to do so with sentences like, “add 25 cents worth of salt from Giquinto’s.” Alas, inflation doth make bad cooks of us all.
Once in a while, if I’m feeling adventurous, I’ll look for something new to try. In the past, that meant cookbooks. But the internet has made thousands of recipes more widely available than ever before, meaning this should be a golden age for amateur cooking. Right?
It turns out that the sheen of the golden age has been dulled by commercial concerns. You don’t need to pay to find good recipes, but since there isn’t (to my knowledge) a single, non-profit-driven, Wikipedia-type recipe repository, you do need to navigate websites that want you to register, peruse ads, or worst of all, read their writing.
A few sites allow you to skip straight to the recipe, but many don’t, which means that before you start cooking, you’ll need to wade through some, and perhaps all, of the following: a preface, a mission statement, a hypothesis, a nutritional guide, a description of the dish’s creation, and the writer’s personal history with the recipe. When I sought a recipe for turkey chili, I first learned “All About” turkey chili, then zipped through “Notes on Ingredients” along with “Favorite Toppings” and “What to Serve With.” I learned about storing the leftovers before I ever made the food. The writer also addressed the fundamental question that’s been plaguing modern philosophers ever since they invented all that nihilism stuff: “Why Turkey Chili?” In terms of food education, it felt like wandering into a senior lecture when all you wanted was the freshman intro class.
Maybe some people come to cooking websites looking for discussion, debate, and philosophy, but not me. Video how-tos fall prey to the same love of expansion and exposition as the blog-style sites; the longer and more full of keywords the content is, the more potential for attracting lucrative ad links. Extracting a recipe from all this mess is the scrolling and buffering equivalent of freeing a family recipe from a possessive, long-winded older relative who’s not quite sure you’re ready to be trusted with it.
As far as advertisers are concerned, the more pictures that accompany your recipe, the better. So instead of just one photo of the finished product, and the element of excitement wondering “Will my food look like the picture at the end?” now we get multiple photography-enabled checkpoints at which to fail. From the uncluttered cleanliness of stage-managed kitchens to the perfect ripeness and coloring of ingredients, at least I know early on to damper my own expectations in comparison.
Reader and viewer comments also complicate the experience. For example, a dubious history—“Fried chicken began when, after frying various other items, a man named Col. Sanders eyed a certain domesticated fowl”—along with a recipe, might be followed by suggestions, adjustments, and other notes from the audience, like, “I think this is the best fried chicken recipe ever, but since I’m vegan, I substituted eggplant for the chicken, and since I avoid fried foods, I decided to bake everything instead of frying. Bravo!”
I’ve never been a big watcher of TV cooking shows, for many of the reasons mentioned above. They take too long and depend too much on the often grating personalities of the hosts. Searching for palatable alternatives, I came across a variety of options: nude cooking shows; Cookin’ with Coolio (the late rapper); Bong Appétit, which combines cannabis and cuisine, and even a cooking show filmed inside a prison.
There’s also Close to the Bone: Surgeons and Chefs, which seems perfect for aspiring cannibalistic serial killers, and Cooking with Dog, which is not a show about how to cook dog, but rather a cooking show with a dog host. The dog, Francis, died several years ago, but through a plush poodle doll and a familiar, Japanese-accented voiceover, he still hosts the show along with Chef, his human lackey. If you’ve ever admired a dog’s refined, discerning taste in edibles, this might be the show for you.
My two favorite cooking shows are more entertaining than instructional. One is Let’s Paint, where the cooking is occasional and largely incidental. The host warns, “You’re not gonna survive in this world without multitasking,” and proves his own readiness by walking on a treadmill while cooking and painting, not to mention sometimes playing chess and blending drinks.
The second winner is the two-season gem Food Party!—half cooking show, half Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. Host Thu Tran seems to be daring you to keep up with her surreal, casual style. An example of the surreal: “And what accompanies deli meat best I think, is oregano-infused cotton candy, which I’ll do right now with my volcano vaporizer.” An example of the casual: “And then I’ll add one egg ’cause that’s all I have left, and then I’ll add some milk. Who knows how much to really add, it’s always different every time. This time I’ll try adding about this much and that should be enough.” Puppets and deadpan humor feature extensively, and if the people from Bong Appétit haven’t checked it out yet, something tells me they’d love it.
The problem with these shows is that while they’re fun to watch, they tend to distract from the task at hand—actual food preparation. So I’ve reverted to using an old print copy of The Betty Crocker Cookbook. I can always find a recipe quickly when I need it, and I don’t have to scroll through Betty’s life story every time.
This method isn’t as exciting as some of the shows I’ve mentioned, but if I find myself lacking in entertainment while cooking, I can always buy a treadmill, introduce some puppets, or get one of those electronic talking button kits so I can have my dog instruct me on how long to cook the meat. (“It’s ready now! It’s ready NOW! IT’S READY NOW!”)
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