What's Cooking?

Flip through any TV channel- local, national or international, you will unmistakably find a cookery show! Kitchen has come a long way from its primitive, sweaty, sooty, grimy, functional workplace to a stage of performing art. Nor is kitchen any longer the domain of mothers, maids and house mistresses .Kitchen space has become more democratic over the years. Everybody is welcome –young ,old ,male, female ,professional , amateurs, poets, police ,painters, actors ,players, lawyers, singers you name them they have performed in this Broadway of baking and cooking.

All these shows irrespective of their being in local, national or international channels are fairly popular and enjoy respectable TRPs. Kitchens cut across clutter, kitchens connect. Busiest of the housewives, working women, dutiful husbands, accomplished bachelors, bespectacled dadajis and bemused daadis all watch cookery shows with interest. If your product /brand have remotest connection with kitchen put your ads in the cookery show and be assured of a sizeable viewership.

Only a couple of decades back kitchen was out of bounds for everybody else except mothers and home makers. Male members’ duty would end with bringing ingredients at the kitchen door. Nor were they interested to know what was happening inside; they were more interested in what was coming out of it rather than what going on inside it.
Things change, stories evolve, plots take new turns and cookery and kitchen were no exception to this law of evolution. As the joint family structure crumbled, women started taking bolder strides into the male world, managing home and office the old elaborate traditional recipes looked desperately out of sync. So were the proponents of them-mothers, dadimas and mother-in-laws. Brands and gadgets jumped in to fill the gap; media took up the role of the new cooking coach and elevated cooking from a daily chore to an exciting serial.
Cookery shows, as represented through camera eye create a sweat less spectacle of feast for the eyes. Under the cool light and cooler air-conditioned ambience of the studio fire burns without smoke, thanks to efficient chimneys, ferocity of frying have been tamed by the shining, silent ovens. The crude and laborious parts of cooking like cutting and cleaning are carefully photo shopped from the frame. Shots of fresh Vegetables dissolve into pre- peeled, chopped, sized and washed pieces in clean glass bowls and Teflon coated pans. Even the ordinary cooking medium like oil sugar and spices are introduced like the cast of a drama with close up spotlight shots. Cookery show is an attempt to spice up the ordinary, glamorizing the grind.

There is an element of discovery and surprise in these shows; the shows bring to limelight the unsung culinary skill of the ordinary or that of the people who are successful or famous in fields other than cooking .As a show it is a complete dish by itself. It neither demands continuity from the archive of our memory space as to what has happened before nor does it leave anything in the “to be continued” format .It is free of the past legacy and future expectations. It narrates, educates, demonstrates and finally rewards the viewer in flat 20 minutes. There is a cogent transaction of skills between the performer and the spectators; recipe empowers the recipients.
No wonder the reality shows based on cooking have grown in popularity across the world. The most popular one - The Master Chef has broken ratings records in two of the world’s biggest markets. It has been successfully running in UK since 1990 and the Australian version became third most watched Australian TV program since 2001. Master Chef is not just a TV show, it has become a cultural phenomena. The soon to come Indian version is even more dramatic because it goes a step further. The show will offer to set the winner for life. The grand prize will be a restaurant in winner’s name. Which the winner will run and make an occupation out of his talent and thus change his/her life forever.
Cookery shows have already made waves in the bigger screen. A Meryl Streep and Amy Adams starrer Julie &Julia went on to receive 27 awards and nominations in different film festivals including nomination for Academy Awards. The screen play was based on two true stories ; My Life in France, Julia Child's autobiography and a memoir by Julie Powell documenting online her daily experiences of cooking each of the 524 recipes in Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
A culinary legend (Julia Child) provides a frustrated office worker (Julie Powell) with a new recipe for life in Julie and Julia. That’s where probably lies the power of cookery shows. It not only tells you how to make you food taste better it also says, that if you have the passion for cooking you can add a new flavor to your life and to the world around. And that’s a recipe worth talking about!