I was watching Food Network’s tribute to Julia Child last night, and it left me with some mixed emotions. Not about Child, who was a national treasure, but about the network itself.
What a strange, timid tribute that was to someone who was such a force of nature. And how odd that they praised Child without ever getting to the heart of what made her so unique and influential.
Prior to Child’s arrival, through her book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and her inaugural PBS program, The French Chef, television cookery was almost entirely recipe-based. The genre was also dependent on corporate sponsorship, for the most part.
Child was neither of those things. Classically trained at the Cordon Bleu (one of the first women to complete the male-dominated program), Child focused on techniques of cooking, the fundamentals that would serve a home cook in preparing virtually any cuisine. She also adopted the French devotion to fresh ingredients, and she was never beholden to the food industry.
I’ll admit to a certain aversion to (all right… “loathing of”) celebrity chefs like Emeril Lagasse and Wolfgang Puck. Seriously, once you’ve opened your fourth casino restaurant in Las Vegas, your credibility as a culinary innovator is pretty much dead on arrival. While I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of their regard for Child, they’re hardly the standard bearers for her brand of culinary education.
Of course, neither is Food Network, no matter how much it owes to Child for raising the standards of the genre and popularizing it. As much as Food Network does right, it does just as much badly.
Too much of their programming seems like thinly disguised advertising. Take Food Finds, Unwrapped, or The Best of… (please!) And while some of their shows offer useful, transportable techniques (Sara’s Secrets and Thirty Minute Meals, for example), some are beyond ghastly. (Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee is a hideous throwback to exactly the kind of cooking show Child was a tonic against.)
Even as a celebrity factory, the network is only marginally successful. Puck hasn’t been able to make the transition from celebrity favorite to household word, like his huckster idol Emeril. Lee is frightening, shrilly insisting every viewer’s husband and kids will love every recipe she semi-makes, reliant on the blanket assumption that everyone who cooks is a wife and mother. (Child never made that mistake throughout her career. And she never tried to suggest anyone should make their own version of an Orange Julius, either.)
Best of the recent batch is probably Paula Deen, of Paula’s Home Cooking. A queen of comfort food, she has a southern permutation of Child’s easy charm. And virtually all of Deen’s recipes start with “melt a stick of butter,” so how wrong can you go?
So maybe it’s not so surprising that Food Network would choose to focus on the cosmetics of Child’s success as opposed to the substance. They can’t quite decide how deep they want to go, so why remind everyone of how good food television can really be?
My suggestion if you want a more complex look at Child and her influence, is to pick up a copy of Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, by Laura Shapiro. Much of the book is devoted to the evolution of the food industry and its attempts to define home cooking and the women at the stove. It’s alternately instructive and hilarious, with lots of great anecdotes of great and not-so-great moments in food marketing. Child rides in towards the end as a protector of good eating, and, boy, did America need her.