What’s cooking? ‘American Masters,’ with profiles of famous chefs

If you’re particularly hungry this month, you may have “American Masters” to thank ... or blame.

The PBS series about icons of their respective fields will spend a lot of time in kitchens over two weeks, with two new profiles of legendary cooks along with two related encores, in what the program is calling its “Chefs Flight.” On Friday, May 19 (check local listings), the first-run “James Beard: America’s First Foodie” is followed by a repeat of a 2004 episode about Julia Child, “Julia! America’s Favorite Chef.” A week later, on May 26, the new “Jacques Pepin: The Art of Craft” is paired with the 2003 hour “Alice Waters and Her Delicious Revolution.”

“James Beard” producer-writerdirector Elizabeth Federici says her film’s subject, the cooking author-teacher-columnist who died in 1985, “was a very large man in many ways, so I think it would have probably been very intimidating (to encounter him) ... but everyone that I’ve ever met, Jacques (Pepin) included, said that he was a very generous man. So, even though his presence was intimidating, he had a way of really putting you at ease – and he appreciated food so much.

“One of the reasons my partner Kathleen (Squires) and I are making this film,” Federici adds, “is because people don’t realize that he really was talking about farm-to-table as early as 1938. That term hadn’t even come into the vernacular yet. He grew up in Oregon, where Naomi (Pomeroy, a chef-restaurateur featured in the Beard biography) and I both live, and he just wanted the rest of the country to know that you don’t have to get your mushrooms from France. There’s probably a forest near you where you could forage them yourself.”

Indeed, Federici notes, “What James Beard always said was that American cuisine is really regional cuisine. We are a huge nation made up of all kinds of culture, and when he was born in 1903, that was all there was ... regional cooking. You cooked where you lived, and you used what was growing and being harvested right near where you lived. That’s the fabric of our country, right? That we are all different, and yet we share many common ingredients. To speak for Jim, I think that’s American cooking, cooking that’s coming out of all of the fabulous regions that make up this great nation.”