Where have all the good cooks gone?

In John Brunner's 1968 future-facing novel Stand On Zanzibar, you don't just watch television, you're inside it as well. Ingenious set-top technology replaces the image of "Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere" in ads and station identification slots with your image -- and that of your dream companion, if you happen to be single. Otherwise you're stuck with your spouse. "There you are wearing clothes you've never owned, doing things you've never done in places you've never been, and it has the immediacy of real life because nowadays television is the real world."

Unfortunately here we are some decades later and what's on in the real world (i.e. not cable) is mostly cooking shows, and not good ones either. Today's half-hour cooking program is led by second-stringers come to prime time, ladies who for years have lurked in the shadows of Julia Child's ample bosom and now emerge, blinking in the bright television studio light, to demonstrate how to roll sushi ("place your nori shiny side out on your bamboo mat. . .") and prepare chicken, squashed on the grill under a brick wrapped in aluminum foil in the best old world style. They are not alone in their kitchens like the masters who have gone before them; no the next generation TV cook has instead a small legion of assistants over whom they can lord, dividing up meal preparation into small groups and then fluttering around the kitchen correcting, praising and pointing out how it clearly shouldn't be done.

This isn't how I remember it; gone from the screen is the stylish and witty Graham Kerr, who would whip up healthy meals with panache, charming housewives in between "I Love Lucy" and "Gilligan's Island" while I lay in bed home sick from school. And the Frugal Gourmet, Jeff Smith, who taught me how to season a wok and make exotic yet simple twelve course meals, also gone, and in a cloud of sexual scandal expected of authors and actors, not chefs and Presbyterian ministers. Classic Julia Child's not dead but she might as well be, available now only on esoteric cable channels I don't subscribe to.

This national drought of good telegenic cooks (not chefs, just regular cooks) is disturbing because food is such a subtle reflection of a culture's memes and mores. Asking what is for dinner is the most truthful way of taking the pulse of the nation. Visiting the United States in 1988, Václav Havel was served a simple carrot and corn Risotto at a state dinner, in keeping with the end of the McDLT-era eighties, ostentation and Styrofoam. Later, at a dinner for President Yeltsin in 1997, the United States served baby reindeer with mushrooms, a reminder of democracy's conquest these days in even the most remote portions of the globe, like it or not. And flying the Pope back to Rome from St. Louis this January, TWA served jumbo prawns and foie gras with fresh figs for hors d'oeuvres aboard Shepherd I, part of a menu that says plenty about organized religion and the people who grow fat from it.

In these uncertain times television needs a crossover cooking celebrity, someone to break out of the ivory tower of cable programming and do network television, even if it is just UPN. (Sit down Emiril, I don't mean you.) Especially now we need a modern-day in-the-flesh Betty Crocker or June Cleaver to show us how to make simple meals with style and ingredients easily procured; someone who can julienne potatoes while looking straight at the camera; someone who can cut fat without sacrificing taste; someone who can do it all, and with a broad smile too. Because if television is indeed the real world, then Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere at least deserve something good for dinner.

gregory@smug.com