Feb 20, 2004  |  By: George Olive  | COMMENTS     

I WAS LOOKING at a cooking demo on a morning news show the other day, marveling at how easy fixing a meal looks on such shows. We forget that everything is measured out and set up ahead of time for them: tiny bowls of herbs and spices to throw in sequence, precut meats, pre-chopped onions, pre-measured liquids.

When the cooks say, “See how simple this is,” they don’t mention the prep time involved in measuring and cutting all the stuff, not to mention having all the ingredients conveniently on hand.

It’s a silly trick that appeals to our obsession with cooking and eating quickly; we see only the performance and not the rehearsals. What takes a TV cook five minutes to prepare on camera may take 20 just to assemble.

I understand that not everyone finds cooking a pleasure, but misrepresenting the time it takes won’t ultimately inspire us. It’s not that cooking has to be terribly complex or time-consuming but, realistically, some effort is required. Sure, you can do a meal from scratch in less than 20 minutes, but only if you scratch the frost off the frozen entree.

Even sillier is that all the utensils on these shows are shiny and new. You need decent tools like with any craft, but I don’t know any serious cooks who have perfectly shiny new-looking everything. My 20-year-old pots and pans are well seasoned and my carbon steel knives are quite stained, but they all work just fine.

But TV is as much about image as reality. Wouldn’t it be refreshing once to see a cook make blackened fish in a blackened pan?

COOKING’S EVEN LESS realistic on food channel cooking shows, where all the kitchen equipment is state of the art: expensive stoves with ovens like Laundromat dryers, built-in deep fryers and grills, pop-up bun warmers, huge counter spaces, top-of-the-line processors.

What about us urban folk with tiny kitchens or us poor folk with limited budgets? How do we manage?

No matter what your equipment, real cooking is physical. It involves sharp objects, hot surfaces.

When I worked as a professional cook, I used to regularly burn my arms and hands, and once I dropped a paring knife straight up into my instep. Ever see this on TV?

Cooking’s messy, too. You never see any cooks on TV having to clean up after themselves. Like TV chefs, I’ve tried leaving a mess in the sink, but it’s always there the next morning.

What you also don’t see yet are gay cooks. My limited experience is that most professional kitchens, at least in less urban areas, are straight and male.

Like the military, cooks have to work as a team, and part of that teamwork is patter about women and sex and sports. Not being able to contribute to this bonding is a disadvantage. Maybe it’s time for “Queer Eggs for the Straight Pie.”

For once I would like to see real reality cooking. What does the cook do when he drops a critical ingredient on the floor, or heats the oil to the smoking point and sets off the smoke alarm, or almost burns his hand on a pot handle? With the demise of edited, live TV, we’ll probably never know.

We had an early glimpse with the original Julia Child shows. They were almost camp in their honest pretensions. Eventually, she, too, cleaned up her TV image. Too bad.

Here’s my idea for a reality cooking show: A cook actually cooks a complex dish from beginning to end in real time. The camera shows all of the decisions, the choices, the mistakes.

If there isn’t enough time in 30 minutes to show the finished dish, it’s continued on the next show until we see the dish taken to its completion and served to family or guests.

Maybe it wouldn’t be popular. Perhaps we don’t have the patience. Maybe it would require a really dynamic personality — a gay personality — to pull this off and make the boring task of real food prep good TV.

Ah, the sexiness of skinning a chicken. The Zen of measuring. The campiness of pink fusilli.

I think there’s an audience for a show like this. But then I like to actually cook, not watch a Reader’s Digest version of it. When I stand behind someone at the supermarket whose basket is piled with TV dinners, I’m reminded of the real reality cooking in America.

And it’s really boring.