Dear uncultured swine,
All my female rage, feminist subtext and goings on about equity, serves just one purpose: the right to demand someone make me a sandwich. My relationship with food is my most passionate; I love growing it, preparing it, tasting it, sharing it and most disturbingly, watching other people make it. Yes baby, deglaze that Coq au vin.
What's harder than my metaphorical penis at the thought of fresh pastries, is defining why art, food and sex seem, all at once, intrinsically linked to TV Chefs. Please enjoy witnessing my brain slowly rot while trying to relate said chefs to art because that's what I said Dis Content was about:
Korma is my boyfriend
If I tell you I'm slipping into something more comfortable, I'm referring to the alternate reality of Jamie Oliver's, The Naked Chef. There's nothing more heart-warming than watching this man wrestle with a sizeable tongue and the name ‘Jules', pluck herbs from a window sill and add more chilli to his already spicy laksa with a cheeky shrug. Not once have I recreated a dish of his.
Do we still believe the collective lie that cooking shows are watched by aspiring chefs hoping to get a few pointers? No. Though it may’ve been the intention behind Cook’s Night Out in 1937 and Julia Child’s The French Chef in 1963, the educational ingredient doesn’t necessarily get to the crust of why cooking shows are still widely indulged (the puns end now).
The Golden Age of TV Chefs blossomed during the 90s and aughts, when home buying, and therefore making, could happen before one’s parents died. Better Homes & Gardens-esque home improvement and, blessedly, cooking shows were a roaring enterprise, with Jamie Oliver, Rick Stein, Heston Blum?dell?burg? and Gordon Ramsay breezing into common lexicon.
But the ripper housing-market alone didn’t account for the pleasure of watching manicured nails dig into minced meat. Emerging from a sea of male chefs was Two Fat Ladies, with Clarissa Wright and Jennifer Paterson. Paterson’s crimson talons would mould, mush, bake or fry an object of her masticatory desire in an almost primordial way. After, as with any good pounding, she’d light a cigarette and enjoy a crisp beverage alongside Wright.
I’m going to tangentially revisit the word primordial. Art has long been preoccupied with food; the apple as it pertains to temptation, seafood and meat indicating wealth, pomegranate as fertility (also genital mutilation), pears as suggestive figures, bread as toast. It’s symbolism is usually indulgent or smutty. As eating inspires similar centres in the monkey-brain as sex, the double entendres make sense. Food is primal, so food is pleasure.
Am I saying Gordon Ramsay is akin to soft porn? Maybe. Anthony Bourdain? Definitely. Food, like sex, is born from bodily necessity. And all bodily necessity fuels art. In Nora Ephron’s, Heartburn, heartbreak isn’t mended with words, but almonds fried in butter and a pinch of salt. Frida Kahlo was as passionate a cook as lover or painter. Author J.R.R Tolkien dedicated entire passages to ale, hard cheese and plain men oops I mean bread.
It makes sense then, that what may’ve started as educational programs on food, evolved into a sensorial art form in its own right. Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown (above), was frequently more philosophy than cooking. Most beautifully in his visit to Sicily, when Bourdain threaded his experience with depression between mouthfuls of homemade salami, fire-scorched cheese wheels and red wine from the fermenting jug.
Though I’ve been depressed for years and am yet to receive homemade salami, comfort watching Two Fat Ladies (below) saying, “Yogurt is not instead of cream. Yogurt is for breakfast, a poor tummy or vegetarians”, is adequate compensation. And it’s not just appeasing the animalistic hungers that makes it so pleasurable. In an age where I’ve been advised on optimised chewing more often than you’d think, watching Bourdain chain-smoke and Oliver get dragged from his bed, hungover, by ‘Jules’ is a valuable, now rare, lesson in uninhibited indulgence.
I’d like to think my TV Chef and cooking show fetish is defiance against obsessive nutrient optimisation. Or that, in this period of intellectualism and over-analysis, I’m subversively belonging to my body, like a true artist, by salivating over Oliver’s beer and passata stewed lamb-shanks. But it could also be that I’m seeking the love and affection I so dearly crave from others in food. I’ll let you decide (no it’s absolutely the latter).
A bit unhinged sorry, please feel free to not like, share or subscribe because we’re all really over-worked and I think the need to be a personal brand and constantly endorse other personal brands is just a lot. Enjoy some downtime instead ok? Eat some salami.
But thanks for reading, thanks Grace for editing :) always.
C U Next Tuesday
Love Maggijeannnnnnnnnnnnnn xxxxxxxx