Pop culture critics are sometimes hard pressed to find anything redeeming in pop culture. I confess to finding myself afflicted in just that way, very often indeed.
But there’s one pop-culture phenomenon that, although it’s been pilloried by many, I can’t get enough of, nor am I willing to disparage it. I speak of the cult of the celebrity chef.
No one reading this, I’m sure, needs to be schooled on the subject, because these guys are everywhere. They inhabit just about every basic-cable TV channel, and their cookbooks and memoirs fill our best-seller shelves. They represent nearly every style of cooking: from Southern U.S. comfort food to Continental haute cuisine. And, completing their commercial triangulation of our culture, they’re happy to offer their own lines of cookware, utensils and gadgets, so we can all aspire to cook just like them.
Is this something new? Not at all. The media saturation that has shaped our culture for the last fifty years or so has brought a novel 
intensity to this chef-as-icon trend, but it didn’t invent it. Consider the career of Alexis Soyer, a chef who wowed the patrons of various London clubs in the 1830s and 1840s, and who championed social causes like soup kitchens for victims of the Irish Potato Famine and military hospital provisioning during the Crimean War. As his fame grew he began capitalizing on it, by publishing cookbooks, and inventing and marketing innovative kitchen tools, like his portable gas cooker, the Soyer Magic Stove.
Sound familiar?
My point is that although hardcore foodies may scoff at the way celebrity chefs have made fine dining accessible to the masses, some of these celebrities are leveraging their fame for the common good. Just as Alexis Soyer attempted to feed the poor, contemporary chefs like Jamie Oliver are speaking out about childhood obesity, sustainable sourcing and healthy culinary practices.
All of which is admirable and should be appreciated and encouraged. Beyond that, though, I have special cause to celebrate the celebrity chef. These guys have saved my family’s Thanksgivings.
This year, the turkey was brined for twenty-four hours in a solution of salt, sugar, herbs and spices. It was stuffed with fresh apples and basted with honey and butter, then roasted to perfection. The pan drippings were combined with a roux built from scratch, to create a flawlessly savory gravy.
Just a few years ago, before I started watching the shows, reading the books and buying the gadgets, I could barely find my way into the kitchen. Everything I ate came boxed and/or frozen, and I usually burned it. And you could have held a gun to my head, and I still would have been unable to tell you what a roux is.
Tony Bourdain, Gordon Ramsay, Alton Brown, et al, changed all that. They not only taught me to cook (in what has to be the biggest, most diverse correspondence course ever imagined), they also taught me to enjoy the process, while also taking it very seriously.
The trick, I think, is to recognize how varied and ubiquitous all this is, and use that to one’s advantage. So rather than becoming a devotee of one chef in particular (which probably means you’ll always cook just like him or her), you can sample and emulate any or all of them. And remember, they’ve infiltrated all our media, which means we can leverage all our media to hone our skills.
Case in point: my learning curve began with me aping some simple recipes right off the TV screen, from
the likes of Food Network. I quickly realized, however, that my basic kitchen chops were sorely lacking. So I customized my own curriculum, with a host of tutorials I found on YouTube. I also utilized my various Wikis and Googles to increase my understanding of ingredients, seasonings and add-ins. Did you know that coriander is actually the seed of the cilantro plant? Neither did I, until I got curious about it and consulted Wikipedia. Now I grow my own cilantro, thank-you-very-much.
So perhaps you can see why I can’t and won’t pile on the celebrity-chef bashing. Are some of them whoring it up, and seriously cashing in? Yes, absolutely.
But as a group, they’ve done enough for me personally, and for my family’s dinner table, that they unreservedly get a pass. This is probably a case of me falling down in my duties as a culture critic, for the most selfish of reasons. If so, then so be it.
I won’t ask your forgiveness. I’ll only tell you that if you tasted my Shepherd’s Pie, you’d understand. Then I’ll share the recipe, and casually mention I got that one from Alton Brown.
