Food for Thought: A Few of My Favourite Things

What's worth watching?

There’s an awful lot of traffic in the food-space these days. But what’s actually GOOD?

I’m a pretty big consumer of food media. Aside from my thousands of poorly-organized recipes saved on Pinterest, my seven-year old’s obsession with pastry and cake-decorating YouTube videos, and the 100+ cookbooks on my shelves it’s safe to say if I’m not doom-scrolling the news or zoned out in front of Downton Abbey (again!) I’m probably watching or reading something about food and cooking.

But one of the things I’m often asked, as someone who went to culinary school and has worked in kitchen is: what’s worth watching? Who is worth a read?

That’s a complicated question. There are lots of great cooks and chefs producing excellent recipes, high quality videos, and entertaining content. And there’s also a lot of excellent work that doesn’t have the production support to back it. Creating a list is agonizing because there is just so much to sift through (hence my batshit insane Pinterest boards), but there are a few people whose work I come back to over and over again because, to me at least, it’s foundational.

These are some of the chefs whose work informs the way I think about food - and trust me folks, this is only part one. I’m going to have to come back to this topic again.

Jacques Pépin: “Alexa, find Jacques Pépin videos” I whisper as I pull on my pajamas at night. Jacques Pépin began his career as an apprentice at the age of 13, not unlike many of the chefs who taught me. Along with Julia Child, he helped popularize and demystify French cuisine in North America. Even though he’s well into his 80s he’s still producing new content that’s practical and do-able for a home cook. His gentle French accent could lull me to sleep, his technique has the comfortable fluency of someone who has practiced for tens of thousands of hours, and if I were to take a cooking video with me to a desert island it would be his video of de-boning a chicken.

Anthony Bourdain: Anthony Bourdain has nearly saintly status among kitchen folks. It is sad that we won’t have more of his writing and his travels (I would love to know what he would have made about the COVID world) but he left behind a oeuvre of work that can be watched over and over. I fell in love with him watching Season 1, Episode 3 of A Cook’s Tour. It wasn’t him eating the beating cobra heart or squid soup at a streetside restuarant in Saigon; it was his visit to La Bibliothèque, a tiny restaurant owned by the even tinier Madame Dai. His ability to weave a story about food into a story about people within the threads of history was amazing. He reminded us to be travelers and not tourists. He’s deeply missed by everyone in the restaurant business.

Marion Grasby: The Facebook algorithms first brought Marion Grasby to my attention, but the recipes got me mesmerized. Marion’s videos bring Thai and Western sensibilities together and, as far as I get tell, gets them bang on every time. Her recipes are accessible, use ingredients that you can find (current shortages not withstanding), and her explanations are clear. She has her mom, Mama Noi, cooking along with her in many videos and we can see that talent runs in the family. I have yet to see a recipe I wouldn’t devour in an instant.

Christina Tosi: Cereal milk. Full stop. Christina Tosi’s recipes punch you straight in the nostalgia. I read about her in a food magazine what seems like an eon ago (long before my professional cooking career) and once I made her Crack Pie I understood how food, and especially dessert, can summon long-forgotten memories. She’s brilliant.

Alton Brown: I’ve been watching Alton Brown from the beginning and I might surrender a body part or two to be a production assistant on his crew. Alton is the master of the deep dive into ingredients and techniques. He gets into the nerdy “whys” of techniques and the science without losing his audience. He makes cooking entertainment without dumbing it down. He despises “unitaskers” (single use tools and appliances), a cause close to my heart as a small space cook. Could watch his Good Eats series on endless repeat (ok… I have).

Andrew Zimmern: If his Bizarre Eats show on the Travel Channel wasn’t enough to lure me in, Andrew’s story of triumph over personal challenges is fascinating on its own. He’s a great cook, an excellent storyteller, a profoundly decent person and, not unlike Bourdain, reminds us that food isn’t just about food, it’s about people. And, on a more personal note, I asked him for a good luck retweet before my final cooking exam at Le Cordon Bleu (that was a thing in 2013, I guess?) and he did! He’s also a fellow Substacker and you can check him out at Spilled Milk. It’s a must read.

I mean, these are six amazing chefs and I’ve barely scratched the surface. But what I have noticed while writing this is that every one of them brings more to cooking that simply recipes. Every one of them brings emotion, memory, and sense of place to food such that it’s not simply sustenance, but substance. It’s how I feel about food too; it’s more than just what’s on the plate.