Are there any? There are plenty of TV cooking shows here about the cuisines of other countries-- Italian, Chinese, French Indian, Scandinavian. Are there shows in Germany, France, Japan, Sweden, etc,. that show people how to cook the dishes of the US of A? Does anyone WANT to cook our food? Maybe the rest of the world assumes that we have no indigenous cuisine except hot dogs and hamburgers. Do we?
Do we?
See Nero’s Wolfe’s famous extemporaneous lecture to Jerome Berin, the originator of saucisse Minuit, in the first chapter of Rex Stout’s detective novel Too Many Cooks (1938).
Wolfe (Stout) made a better case for U.S. cuisine in 1938 than anyone has since.
from what ive heard they just dub the normal cooking shows we have here like they did for iron chef …….or subtitle them
Can’t wait to try the Bacon Breakfast Cupcake!
We get restaurant tours, and cooking competitions, from the USA, but nothing like the home cooking shows of one kind or another that we get from the BBC. Where a chef or cook or entertainer eats or helps prepare or prepares traditional home food in France, Greece, India or the UK.
Except when Jamie Oliver (BBC) visited the USA, and that was several years ago.
Back in the '90s, there was a show on Russian TV called JOE after both the host, who was American, and the Russian acronym for “Let’s live excellently.” The guy didn’t speak a word of Russian, so his hot wife, who was Russian, narrated for him. He used to make “American” dishes like steak on the grill and trout poached in champagne while pointing and mugging for the camera.
Was that the one where he tried to get Americans to eat more healthily by cutting out junk food? As I recall, he pissed off just about everybody he talked to.*
I remember when he was the Naked Chef in Britain, he made “American hamburgers and fries” for a pal who was an Elvis impersonator.
*Though West Virginia is admittedly not the best place to try this.
Ogod, I’d love to see that.
Well, The Biggest Loser was franchised in a number of countries.
I’m wondering if that’s the one where he called American kids brainwashed because they preferred Chicken McNuggets to his own handmade chicken offering.
I remember that fiasco … I think food network dropped his shows after that too (he was on the weekends a lot )
He did that here too. Seems pretty noble in intent, if you ask me, but he got a lot of stick for it for daring to critique the junk food norm.
He did Jamie’s American Road Trip too though, where the premise was “everyone thinks American food is just Big Macs and nothing else, but here’s how great a variety of cuisine there really is”. Visited all sorts of places and presented all sorts of stuff.
Well, good for him then. I’ll be 64 in January, and I’ve yet to sample all that American cuisine has to offer.
The attitude of most people I saw him talk to in the other series was “How dare you come over here and tell us how to eat? Would the Government allow such food on the market if it wasn’t good for us?”
On the Australian free-to-air food channel the current run of shows about US food are all US-made and oriented.
Impressionistically, most of them involve loud fat people shouting at other loud fat people while they compete or catastrophise about their dessert / highly decorated cake / stupidly managed restaurant / barbecue deadline.
There are a few that are more historical and documentary oriented shows, often about regional cuisines, which I’ve usually found quite watchable.
That’s become the trend in the last few years. I don’t bother watching the food channels any more; even the ones that go “undercover” with “hidden cameras” are all scripted. They’re a complete waste of time.
Sad, really. The cooking shows on YouTube from 30, 40, 50 years ago are still worth watching, though.
I like cooking shows that actually show you how to cook something, ideally with explanations for why various processes and techniques work. Unfortunately, having a dedicated network seems to have infected the whole cooking-show ecosystem with a bad case of reality TV.
The attitude was similar here - a lot of “how dare you?!” - though not with Government certification being mentioned. His point wasn’t “this is poison, it must always be avoided”, more “this is nutritionally very poor: very sugary, very salty, very fatty. You’re therefore in trouble if you routinely eat it; you need to shift your priorities and stop thinking of food in such a perfunctory way. Cook good food more often, it’s important.”
There was a lot of indignation about it from people who didn’t like being told what to do (even though their lifestyles seemed to suggest they needed to be), saying that their kids would never eat something that wasn’t fried, etc.
Like I say, a noble attitude but perhaps his delivery was always doomed to rile folks up.
Was he the guy with the crusade against “pink slime”?
He wasn’t the only one, but yeah, that was part of his act.
I always joked that if someone discovered a tribe with an ancient tradition of old ladies meticulously scraping the last scraps of meat off bones with obsidian knives and pounding the scraps into something to eat it would be marveled as an example of how efficiently these people used their resources, but throw some bones in a centrifuge and it’s “pink slime”.