The interesting part about the Cindy McCain mini-recipe kerfuffle (in which it was discovered that recipes listed as the McCain's personal home cooking were actually drawn verbatim from Food Network) is that every single current Food Network TV chef does much the same thing, and I've long found it highly obnoxious. "Oomph", groans Giada, as she decorously slithers her "favorite" lasagne into her mouth, or such and such dish like "her mother used to make". The number of Rachel Ray's dishes that she claims she "usually" makes in X or Y fashion are legion. And I won't even get into the pastiche clown, Guy Fieri.
In reality, no one has a ready repertoire of favorite dishes which they've served multiple times in the past vast enough to cover 3 dishes a day for even 30 episodes a year. My own grandmother, for example, a highly talented cook who fed a family all three meals every single day for 40 years, can count perhaps 10 dishes that would qualify as "favorites", or specialties, or about which she can claim with any plausibility "I usually serve it this or that way". She knows of, and can probably execute, any number of other dishes, but those are always in the context of having learned them from some woman in the past, or once having been served it at dinner. In the same way, listen carefully to Batali or Pepin on TV. Very rarely does either use the Food TV code. Rather, they learned the dish in Amalfi, or know puff pastry to be made in this way, or once ate it and remember the flavor vividly. There is none of the forced, fake, intimacy of Rachel Ray's apparently bachannalian home feasts, at which we are to suppose she serves 14 dishes a night to an army of hungry omnivores. Of course, professional chefs have a much larger mental library to work from than the rest of us. But that is obviously not what they're invoking on TV.
None of this is to say that there's no value in Food Network, or that I hate the hosts. There is, and I don't. But it is rich of someone to complain on Rachel Ray's behalf that Cindy McCain['s intern] stole her recipes as her own.
4/16/2008
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4 comments:
First of all, let me start by saying that I agree with what you are saying about Food Network chefs calling everything "their fav...". That's pretty clear to me. Also, I admit i'm not a big fan of Rachael Ray's. I don't hate her or anything like that. I understand that she has something to offer that is attractive to a lot of people so my hat off to her because she obviously is a hard worker and she has made a lot of money for a lot of people.
then Giada... well, what can I say? She is cute, beutiful smile, from a fascinating Italian family, very attractive. She knows how to cook but not any better than anyone I know. In fact, if I have to be honest with you (don't laugh), I just told my husband the other day that I am certain I am a better pastry chef than Giada (she studied pastry at Cordon Bleu in Paris and worked at the Ritz Carlton like I did). My husband couldn't believe what I was saying. But yes, I know I'm a better pastry chef than her, but I also know that I'm not as cute as her, probably not as good as a communicator and so on. So my point is that the Food Network chefs are really not chefs (except for Mario and Bobby I suppose) but most people don't want to see chefs. They want to see regular guys and gals like them.
In regards to stealing recipes... Well, this is another subject I think about a lot. Maybe is different for pastry chefs because pastry is such a science. Pastry chefs borrow from others and adapt into their own all the time. I use basic recipes that I have gathered throughout my career and make changes as I go along and the same for most pastry chefs, even the most renowned pastry chefs in the world use recipes that they have borrowed from their mentors. It's just how it is. No one goes to work and says today I'm making a different recipe for brownies and start scaling without a reference recipe.
I was watching the Howard Stern Show on Demand the other day and he had Billy Joel's wife on the show talking about a cookbook she has published. She had a recipe for chocolate chip cookies in there and Howard asked her if she developed the recipe herself or if she had borrowed it. She said she made it up herself. What??? That's a bunch of bull!! I couldn't believe it!! I guess that only true chefs are able to admit their limits. How brave of her I thought.
Wow, that was long. I bet I put you to sleep!
No, I'm definitely not asleep! And I'm sure, from your website, that you are better than Giada at pastry.
You didn't happen to work at the Ritz in Paris, did you? I enjoyed a couple of weeks at the Ritz Escoffier very much a couple of summers ago.
No, the Ritz in Paris is not part of the Ritz Carlton family which by the way is owned by Marriott. I worked at the Ritz-Carlton Palm Beach and Giada worked at a Ritz Carlton somewhere in California, I want to say SF but not sure.
Anyway, I shouldn't have even said anything. Big mouth.
One can come up with new recipes for something other than baking (I agree that in that area, proportions are too important to start from scratch) if one is willing to throw together various things one likes to see how they work together. My new favorite salad of roasted cauliflower, mango and arugula came about this way; I had had a crabmeat, mango and arugula salad in London three years ago so I knew two of the ingredients went well together, and decided to substitute a yellow veggie for the crab. It worked really well -- I didn't bother with a dressing because the mango juice and bits of roasted garlic coming off the cauliflower was enough to flavor the whole salad.
If Cindy McCain has had to do much cooking for her family, I'm sure she's done similar things. My mom has come up with her own curries of vegetables that weren't available in India, just by trying the basic spices and cooking methods on whatever she finds in the produce section. Frankly I'm surprised that the intern thought passion fruit mousse or ahi tuna with Napa cabbage slaw were optimal recipes for a presidential candidate's wife to claim as "favorites" -- even if they're not actually difficult, they sound decidedly elitist ;-) In contrast, foods that she could claim as typical of her Arizona upbringing (e.g., stuff with Mexican influence), or even better, a recipe she picked up in South Asia while working with Mother Teresa and adopting her daughter, would sound more real even if they weren't genuinely common in the McCain kitchen.
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