Cooking by the tube

I just read an article in the Washington Post about how to learn how to cook from television shows. Which is not difficult, especially considering that that is how I learned most of what I know about food and cooking, with a little additional help from books, family, friends, websites and my own overly fertile imagination. And I still watch cooking shows – Jamie Oliver last night – and enjoy not just the food, but the people involved. There are so many different styles and cuisines being played with, making it all even better than a saas-bahu soap!

Perhaps my favourite when I was in college was the Frugal Gourmet. He taught me how not to wash mushrooms, how to tear lettuce instead of chopping it and that what makes a good chicken soup is the love that goes into it, not the vegetables, herbs and salt. He also suggested I could use lemon juice to make up for a deficiency in salt. And I did all of that and more, and loved it and the results. So did everyone who ate what I cooked up.

Soon I was hooked on to Madhur Jaffrey, who actually taught me how to make lump-free kadi, that wonderful golden liquid made of buttermilk or sour yoghurt, redolent with fenugreek, asafoetida and tiny pakodas a-crackle with ginger and chillies. Her rotis came out varied shapes, her dal sometimes looked lumpy and her curries were not more fiery than I or my digestive system could handle. And she was exquisitely neat, her cooking surfaces cleaned and her splashing not beyond my endurance.

Floyd on the other hand was messy, but carried watchers along with him. He walked the streets of wherever he was and ate whatever he found, with joy and a huge appetite. He cooked interestingly, with enormous amounts of spices and not much regard for finesse, and drank liberally, which made him funny, human, but best in small doses.

Oliver I watch because Oliver I read. His recipes are simple and make the culinary world easy to travel through, wandering through the Far East and India even in the making of a basic lobster sandwich. He touches my tummy with his deft handling of food and neat presentation and, most of all, his love for his family, wife, daughters, parents and friends.

Perhaps Anthony Bourdain is the best of my lot. He doesn’t cook a whole lot in how television shows, but goes all over the world eating his way through the strangest of foods. Last seen, he was in China, crunching on stuff I could never even look at, leave alone identify, and he truly enjoyed it all. And if he didn’t, he said so, in his characteristic bored-but-loving-it style and his maverick history.

In this kind of environment, India has come up with its own brand of television chef, too many to list comprehensively. There is Mallika Badrinath, who propagates the principles of low-cal cuisine, perhaps because it sells, for now. Kunal Vijaykar eats his way through the country, with a certain amateurish charm and casual table manners. And Sanjeev Kapoor, of course, the love of many an aspiring chef, has his audience captured and rapt with much practice, an everyday simplicity and deep dimples. And many more, whose names I cannot begin to remember.