I read a great short essay in the New York Times today by food columnist Eric Kim, in which he calls himself a “Food Network Baby” who, along with others of his generation, learned to cook–and to enjoy food as culture–by watching Emeril Lagasse, Rachael Ray, and other TV chefs in the late 90s and early 00s.
I could tell a similar story, but it would start a few years earlier, in the Horse Latitudes of my life when I was teaching 6th grade and…not a whole lot else. My friends had all moved away; I had broken up with my boyfriend. I was tired of rearranging my sock drawer and dying for conversation that didn’t revolve around farts. I didn’t even have cable television. So, I rented a lot of anime on VHS from Blockbuster. And, I watched cooking shows on PBS.
My mom had taught me to cook growing up, but it was a chore for both of us. She was busy working and rearing kids, plus dealing with ailing parents. And all of her and my father’s food sensitivities dealt us a pretty limited culinary hand. PBS, on the other hand, showed Martin Yan slicing and dicing his way through a rainbow of vegetables and making pancakes with scallions of all things. What were scallions, even? Were they same as shallots? (Remember, kids, this was before the Internet.) And then there was Jacques Pepin, permanently debonaire, “cooking with Claudine,” his gloriously-red-haired daughter, showing her how “simple” it was after all to turn out a Quiche Lorraine or a Tarte Tatin. Having lost my own father just a few years prior, how could I not be mesmerized? I watched the Frugal Gourmet, Graham Kerr, Sarah Moulton, Caprial Pence…and of course some Julia Child re-runs, but her show was a bit too old-school for me with its dark, panned-out camera work and mid-century menu.
I started trying my hand at some of the recipes I saw the PBS chefs making. At first, my chicken stir fry came out dry, I burned the garlic, my julienne of zucchini looked more like a pile of scrap lumber. But I had nothing else to do, and this–cooking for myself, feeding myself–felt like something I had been missing, something I needed. So, I kept at it. And I started getting better. Dishes would turn out the same way twice in a row, and they would taste good both times. Soon, I could try new recipes with less of a failure curve because I knew not to overmix batters, how to balance salty, sweet, and sour flavors, how to add a little water to the pan to compensate for the dryness of my climate and get a proper sauté without burning. I bought myself a subscription to Cooking Light and cooked my way through whole issues to feed my friends (which I had at that point, thank you very much, having relocated to Austin for grad school. It didn’t hurt, either, having Central Market around so I didn’t have to waste an afternoon driving all over Albuquerque to find one container of mascarpone cheese that would then of course turn out to be rancid and ruin my tiramisù).
Cooking is my love language now. When I got into my new apartment in Berlin, one of the first things I did was go to the grocery store and make myself Smitten Kitchen’s soba noodles with egg ribbons. It made me feel safe and at home. I owe a good bit of that to those PBS chefs who made me feel safe and at home at a time when I really didn’t.
Last year during the pandemic I got a chance to attend a virtual cooking class through the Asian Art Museum with Martin Yan (who hasn’t aged a year, I swear). In the Q&A period, the moderator read him my comment thanking him for teaching me how to cook, and he smiled. He said how much he had enjoyed making Yan Can Cook! for PBS because his mission in life was to teach people to find the joy in cooking that he had found.
I think that’s something the PBS chefs had that the Food Network generation didn’t–a mission to educate, not to get ratings. They didn’t have to get their teeth whitened and smile into Camera 2 and sell their personal brand of salad dressing. They were just good company. If you want to see what I mean, just watch Yan make his classic scallion pancakes.
The Rookery 