The following is a rant. Because it is for a civilized website, I will do my best to keep it polite. But this is one idiocy, plucked from television's large army of dimwitted efforts, that makes me especially irritated. It has to do with cooking shows -- and the high cost of certain elite ingredients...
A Sept. 13 Associated Press story had this as its lead:
"The ranks of the nation's poor have swelled to a record 46.2 million -- nearly 1 in 6 Americans -- as the prolonged pain of the recession leaves millions still struggling and out of work. And the number without health insurance has reached 49.9 million, the most in over two decades."
As I revealed in a piece I wrote for this site a few months ago, a lot of cooking shows find their way into our home. And it's the attitude of some of those overpaid, usually overweight TV cooks about ingredients that makes my blood rise to a rolling, well-salted boil.
Way too often, these hefty celebrities who are spending other people's money talk with maddening condescension to their audience about the use of ingredients -- more specifically, the enduring shame of not pouring the best olive oil, thin-slicing the costliest of truffles or flavoring "only with a wine you would drink yourself."
It goes on all the time, from using only freshly squeezed citrus to adding only a good (translate "expensive") chocolate, to flambeing only with a "really good" brandy. There is way too much of this snobbery. And its pervasiveness is matched only by its cluelessness.
Food Network's Ina Garten, host of Barefoot Contessa, is the champion practitioner of food snobbery, perhaps because she lives in East Hampton -- which appears, from watching her, to have been spared a recession (see photo at top of column). She's closely followed by Mario Batali and Emeril Lagasse. Perhaps because of her many years at Gourmet, even Sara Moulton sometimes slips into a fantasy mode while Rachael Ray (above) has turned Extra Virgin Olive Oil into not only an acronym, but an official grocery-store brand: EVOO.
I heard a chef today tell his viewers if they used concentrated orange juice in the recipe he was preparing instead of squeezing the juice from whole oranges, "You'd better not tell me about it." That is was Chef Walter Stalb (right), whose A Taste if History runs on perpetually impoverished public television, made the transgression all the more absurd.
The list is longer, but it's the attitude more than the transgressors that burns me.
One in six Americans is living in poverty, and almost 50 million Americans can't afford a visit to a physician. If these prima-donna disciples of standing rib and Courvoisier really believe their stern advisories to pay top prices for quickly digested ingredients will indeed persuade their followers to buy only highly priced hunks of Parmigiano-Reggiano or imported Belgian chocolates instead of doing more necessary things with their limited funds, then these baloney-brained chefs should be indicted for child endangerment, gross misuse of funds and abject moronity.
I heard my parents talk about the Great Depression. What we're in the midst of today isn't as bad as that time. Nonetheless, it's a awful time most of us are enduring. It's not the time, I believe, to be endlessly espousing the kind of blind, siphoning materialism that helped put us all here. Cheese from a green can isn't great, but it won't mark you with an indelible brand of shame either.
If there is any parallel path in the fate of a monarch who ignored the crumbling world around her to sell her subjects on the qualities of cake, and were I one of the celebrity chefs who seem to share that same vacant thought process, I would keep my chef's knives locked up and the Cuisinart permanently unplugged, before someone flambeed me with some cooking sherry.
From a screw-top bottle.