Whet your appetite with these two (the dish and the host).

What made you decide to write this book?

I think television cooking is a genre that has been unfairly overlooked. It’s been around as long as television has, but it has no biography. Unlike reality TV, a genre which seemed to transform our prime time viewing habits overnight and which has spawned lots of books, cooking shows are taken for granted and are easy to overlook, like part of the woodwork. I think they deserve more attention, especially since they’ve exploded in the last decade and a half in terms of volume and popularity. And the fact that most people assume that Julia Child was the host of the first television cooking indicates a disturbing gap in American popular culture knowledge!

The horror! So you’re telling me Julia Child was not the first?

She is the first name and face that most people remember or think of – with good reason – but there were many before her, almost twenty years earlier. But certainly no one who had all the goods like she did.

How did you research this book?

I spent a lot of time reading both popular and scholarly books and articles about television, food and 20^th century American history and culture. I visited archives to look at the papers of Julia Child and Dione Lucas, for example, and some of the scarce old cooking show videos that still exist. Though I used some scholarly sources to inform my thinking, I wanted the book to be accessible and entertaining to read. I think the voices of the people I interviewed helped with that a lot.

Who was the most interesting to interview?

It was a complete thrill to talk to Graham and Treena Kerr. I was very young when I watched “The Galloping Gourmet” so it seems like another lifetime ago, and there he was talking to me on the phone with his wife, from a boat. It was such a pleasure to listen to Molly O’Neill think out loud – her responses to my questions were the opposite of rehearsed rejoinders. She has written a lot about food in American culture and she is very smart and has such a solid grasp of the hows and whys of cultural trends. Of course Anthony Bourdain is hilarious and sassy. I sat with Jacques Pepin in the dining room of the French Culinary Institute. He was in his chef’s whites and I felt like I was in the presence of royalty. But he was so funny and charming and down to earth. Everybody I talked to was so generous.

Were you surprised by anything you heard from any of them?

Yes, because of my own mistaken assumptions. I expected these exalted people in the food world to express some disdain for the Food Network – and while some of them did, every one of them said they felt that the Network serves an important purpose and that it’s a good thing to have happened to the culture. There seems to be a genuine desire amongst these people to really have everyone cooking and learning about food and enjoying it. The general spirit is very democratic.

Why are cooking shows so popular and enduring?

It’s different for everyone, but I think these programs touch on so many needs and desires in subtle ways. And they’re still around after sixty plus years because they have evolved, just like any other organism.

You use the id and superego metaphors a few times in this book. Do you have a complex?

I do have a metaphor obsession, I’ll admit – to wit my very unscientific use of the evolution model. As for the Freudian reference, it pertains here because I really believe food television speaks to our basic selves, both our needs and our wants. We want to be entertained and yet we want to learn or feel productive in some way. To me that signifies optimism and desire for self-improvement – as individuals and as a society. Some of us get one thing out of it, others get something different. But I still think the person slumped on the couch watching the Food Network feels a little less slacker-ish than the person watching MTV. There’s absolutely a place in our culture for both “Iron Chef America” and “Punk’d” but the handy thing about food television is that it provides the pleasure and the learning in one package. Guilt-”lite” TV and education by stealth.