Chef Appeal
15
man comes across as a big cuddly family guy. Prancing around the kitchen set
like Santa Claus, he serves up heaping portions of familial conviviality with his
dishes by repeating such hearth-conjuring slogans as, “It’s a food-of-love
thing!” In fact, most of the time when any chef is filmed in a kitchen, he or she
is demonstrating recipes viewers are supposed to be able to do at home, and
doing so in home-scaled quantities, so that the analogy of the TV kitchen to the
home kitchen is ubiquitous. Against the symbolic backdrop of domesticity, the
chef plays a role equally impressive in competence and passion as that of his or
her professional alter ego. On television, he or she is not Just a homemaker like
you or me but a veritable domestic shaman, healer, and enhancer of all bonds
interpersonal. In Tyler Florence’s Food 911, the chef answers to house calls,
many asking him to rectify their degeneration of traditional recipes. In the
process, Florence salvages nothing less than family history and ethnic pride. He
can also help people to woo a date or spice up a marriage by teaching them the
culinary tricks that ensure flawless reproduction of the favorite dishes of their
loved ones. Chefs like Florence—including Alan Harding on Cookin' in
Brooklyn, Rosemary Schraeger in Rosemaiy: Queen of the Kitchen, and Markus
Sammuelson of Inner Chef (dA\ on the Discovery Home channel), and Curtis
Stone’s Take Home Chef (on TLC)—consistently play the dens ex machinas of
domestic events, swooping in to save potentially disastrous dates, parties, and
family reunions. Less interventionist in their devices, but equally committed to
the illusion of incessant and impassioned home entertaining, are such Food
Network shows as Easy Entertaining with Michael Chiarello, Giada
DiLaurentis’s Evetyday Italian, and the programs of Jamie Oliver—which
invariably feature the chefs preparing a menu followed by montages of them
serving it up to cozy gatherings of friends, partners, or family members.
As a manual laborer, the televised chef in the kitchen matches every
primitivistic portra