Jacinda and Christopher, two passionate yet practical home cooks, have produced their own homegrown cooking shows. They’re open to guest chefs, too.

Today is the last day of the Southwest Texas Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association 30th annual conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I presented a paper on the problems inherent in finding and viewing old television programs for study. That’s a problem I ran into when researching this book. First, there’s the issue of the great volume of TV shows produced in the U.S. – that requires the time and talent of lots of people processing old tapes and kinescopes to make them available to the public. There’s also the problem of rights and ownership and all of that. And with cooking shows in particular, back in the days of the appliance or utility company-sponsored programs hosted by home economists, nobody ever thought such shows would be worth saving. They were seen as ephemeral. Who’d have though someone would actually want to watch them fifty years down the road? I did find some at great archives and libraries like the UCLA Film and TV Archive and the Paley Center for Media and the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, but they are rare indeed. Let’s hope that today’s programs will be available for future scholars and everybody else. By now we should know that there’s value in everything that anyone puts in the time and effort to produce.

I moved to a new apartment recently and decided to leave my Paleolithic non-digital TV behind with no replacement planned. Mind you, this is after several decades of never living without a TV. This is someone who has always loved TV and who wrote a book about TV cooking shows. Friends and family were startled (even angry) when I mentioned my courageous streamlined lifestyle choice. “You won’t survive a minute,” they warned. “And what will you do?” Well, I’m happy to report I’m doing just fine and don’t miss the big old thing at all. As many of you have already discovered, you don’t need a TV to watch TV. It’s right there on the Internet, just like everything else in the universe. Hulu.com is my new best friend. And you know what’s on the Food Network site besides recipes and celebrity chef photos? Full-length TV cooking shows.

And speaking of TV and food on the Internet, you might have heard about Gordon Ramsay’s “Cookalong Live” which, like so many UK TV shows, is reportedly making its way to US TV soon. You can watch short training videos on the website and bits of the show episodes on You Tube and elsewhere. The Channel 4 website apprises viewers of all the ingredients and gear they need to be prepared to actually cook along with Chef Ramsay. Very clever!

However, I cannot resist reminding you that 13 years ago Sara Moulton began hosting “Cooking Live” on the Food Network where she literally cooked a dish live from start to finish – I mean peeling the garlic and washing her hands and everything. And all the while she would take phone calls from viewers at home who were (allegedly) cooking along with her. They, too, had been prepped with get-ahead ingredients. Both Ramsay’s and Moulton’s shows promote(d) home cooking. Moulton didn’t have multiple cameras on set (or the truck driver’s mouth), but her show was a mainstay at the Food Network for five good years. Let’s not forget our foremothers!

In Mark Bittman’s New York Times Bitten blog, blogger Daniel Meyer admits to playing cooking show host when he’s alone in the kitchen. He provoked a similar confession from several readers. Come on, you’ve done it, too, haven’t you? I started doing it in elementary school while making my bologna sandwich on Wonder Bread.

And if the James Beard Awards commended the best TV cooking show host imitation, I would nominate the Mini Minimalist.