The notion of TV dinner - that is, cooking on television - began 44 years ago in Boston when a not-young, not-thin NBA-forward-of-a-woman with a warbling voice took to the airwaves revealing the pleasures of Gallic cuisine.
The camera loved her immediately.
Since Julia Child's The French Chef, cooking shows have proliferated but not necessarily progressed.
Certainly there are more cameras, especially the all-important saucepan cam, and mediocre music (a ubiquitous Kenny G-like ragu), but the dominant chop-and-stir format remains.
This helps explain the genre's popularity. Food programs, now available on multiple channels with a panoply of host personalities, offer the winter-stew comfort of the familiar.
They're the polar opposite of CSI's global domination. There are never dramatic twists at the end. Every souffle rises.
Still, the Food Network, launched in November 1993, has managed a radical transformation in telecuisine. It has strained the exoticism, artistry, intelligence, mystery, sex, emotion and much of the pleasure out of cooking.
To wit: Rachael Ray, our lady of the perpetual Triscuit.
To watch the network for an entire day, which I did recently, is to be pelted with the words easy and simple, fast and yum-o ad nauseam. It's all about speed, ignoring the attraction of slowing time down and reviving deprived senses.
Frequently, the Food Network forgets to tell stories about food, something PBS's offerings - relegated to Saturday afternoons on WHYY TV12 - do infinitely better.
Gourmet's Diary of a Foodie films real people cooking in real light in exotic habitats, as much travelogue as how-to. (Alas, it's hard to catch. Who's home at 2 p.
m. Saturday?) The same is true for other PBS food offerings: Lidia Bastianich, as close an heir to Julia as television has now, recalls family traditions with zest.
And why can't we have more Jacques P e pin, the Lyonnais master with his soothing intelligence and verve?
Cooking is a way of inviting other cultures into the kitchen, though the Food Network's vision is stridently American. The strongest accents belong to Emeril Lagasse and Paula Deen, with as much focus on their hammy showmanship and regional shtick as their joy of cooking.
Exotic chefs are relegated to Iron Chef America, the network's most entertaining program, where the chefs barely speak.
It's delightful that the divine Nigella Lawson, formerly on the increasingly clueless Style Network, recently joined the Food Network kitchen with Nigella Feasts. Her programs are among the most sophisticated and inviting on television, with a softer approach to the standard harsh lighting and artificiality that have been staples since Julia.
Lawson is television's sauciest cook, sensually working with her hands while never dumbing down. Her show works on all levels. You want to feast at her table.
Peripatetic Anthony Bourdain, he of the fearless gullet, is too adventurous and dangerous, liberated from the chop-and-stir claustrophobia of studio kitchens for the evoo-likes of the Food Network. His No Reservations travels the globe Monday nights on the Travel Channel.
Bravo's Top Chef, in its second season (with improved hosts Padma Lakshmi - her marriage to Salman Rushdie inverting the space-time continuum - and veteran chef Tom Colicchio), is the culinary response to the network's hit Project Runway.
What the series adds in over-the-top personalities and theatrics - a-teaspoon-away-from-meltdown Betty (booted last week) and mad-haired Marcel - it is still grasping for in craft.
The Food Network suffers from cable's rampant ESPNization, converting any activity into sport by imposing manufactured pressures of time, resources and situations. Speed is of the essence in restaurants - that's why Iron Chef works - but does it truly improve home cooking when already too little time and care are put into creating memorable meals?
The argument that people are too busy to cook purposefully is specious when they have hours nightly to watch television and troll the Internet.
Cooking shows, like much of television news, emphasize personality often at the expense of content. That's why the ubiquitous Ray succeeds.
She's too much personality, and another example of the dumb-down effect. People relate to Ray for her pretense of knowing less than anyone else, but isn't that counterintuitive, when we should want to learn from people who do? Ray's the antithesis of Julia.
Anyone suggesting barbecued succotash ought to rethink the whole equation.
Paula Deen, for all her Rue McClanahan folksy quality - yes, she's charming - commits dietary heresy on a regular basis. For a light-cooking episode, she created a cake with Egg Beaters and two cups of Splenda instead of a fruit dessert, and an appetizer consisting of copious amounts of "light" mayonnaise and sour and cream cheeses.
About Sandra Lee's Semi-Homemade universe, the less said the better, except that her naughty cheerleader affect - a science-experiment cocktail on every episode - has garnered her guilty-pleasure cult status in the blogosphere.
Since Ray was anointed by Oprah, transcending food into her own empire, Giada De Laurentiis has been tapped to serve as kitchen princess. Giada's Weekend Getaways debuts tomorrow, a more elegant antidote to Ray's $40 a Day, where everything was yum-o, the obverse of critical reasoning.
De Laurentiis has a cooking background, and is better at storytelling than most hosts. Her shows have learned well from the lighting and professionalism of Lawson's vision. You actually want to eat her food.
Tyler Florence cooked a Peking duck recently in a friend's kitchen, a smart lesson that allowed viewers to believe they could do it at home, too. If only the Food Network would get out of the studio kitchen more.Ina Garten (The Barefoot Contessa) is one of the best of the TV chefs, a sane and experienced hand.
Easy Entertaining With Michael Chiarello - there's that buzzword again - also works, set in a handsome Napa Valley kitchen and venturing outdoors. Chiarello has a calm, grown-up manner that balances out the Ritalin-requiring behavior displayed by the exuberant showman chefs.
Mario Batali is an example where television, or his producer's direction, can bland a personality to gruel.
None of Batali's Falstaffian ways, as reported in Bill Buford's winning book, Heat, are in evidence in his various TV guises. What the Food Network needs is the true outsize qualities of gifted cooks, what makes chefs chefs, teaching and sharing the glories of food and craft.
What we need are more Julias.
For all those hours spent watching food television, little of the meals proved mouthwatering. This can occur when there's Splenda and barbecued succotash and not enough romance, intelligence or, for that matter, sizzle.
Total hours elapsed watching: Eight.
Food consumed: One bowl of Grape Nuts, two cups of La Colombe Corsica coffee, one Pequea Valley blueberry yogurt, cashews, four slices of Prima Donna cheese.
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