PBS toasts famous chefs, burns cooking contests
Highlights from the Television Critics Association’s winter preview of upcoming shows.
PASADENA, CALIF. American Masters is about to make you very, very hungry. This May, the PBS series is offering a Chefs Flight of four films, all about famous chefs. The Flight will combine two new shows, Jacques Pepin: The Art of Craft and James Beard: America’s First Foodie with two repeats, Alice Waters and Her Delicious Revolution and Julia! America’s Favorite Chef.
Waters and Pepin are no strangers to TV, from cooking shows to documentaries.
But there is one kind of TV food show they will not do or watch: cooking competition shows such as Top Chef.
“It’s a disservice,” Pepin told television critics. “This is not what cooking is all about. Cooking is about loving and sharing. That kind of confrontation is not what cooking is about.”
“We’re teaching the fast-food values of our country,” adds Waters. “Cooking really is something that can be very meditative. It’s never about competition. It’s about the pleasure of dealing with real food, and having a compe- tence for your own self about chopping and learning how to do this. It’s empowering.”
Most of us, of course, don’t compete with anyone in our own kitchens. But we do make other mistakes — and chef Naomi Pomeroy, who appears in the James
Beard film, says one of the biggest is we don’t taste the food enough when we’re cooking.
“If you’ve finished cooking a full meal and you’re still hungry and ready to sit down and eat,” says Pomeroy, “maybe you haven’t tasted enough.”
Pepin says the worst mistake is assuming a recipe will come out the same way every time; it won’t, because ingredients change — which is why you have to taste. “Food I taste a lot,” Pepin says. “Wine I taste even more.”
‘GREAT WAR’ LESSONS
It was the War to End All Wars — that didn’t.
On April 10, four days after the 100th anniversary of America’s entry into World War I, PBS will debut The Great War. Airing over three nights, the six-hour series tells the story of the “war to end all wars” through the voices of those who fought in Europe and those who supported them — and sometimes opposed them — on the homefront.
What’s fascinating about the war, producer Stephen Ives said, is that most Americans desperately wanted to stay out of it — in- cluding President Woodrow Wilson. And yet once America entered the war, it did so with full-throated passion.
Much of the focus of the show will be on Wilson, who remains controversial today. “He was the most idealistic president we ever had,” biographer A. Scott Berg says. “He was a man of intense integrity. A lot of people disagreed with him a hundred years ago, a lot of people disagree with him today. ... But make no mistake, he made the world we have today.”
But War is about more than Wilson. Race, women’s rights, immigration, federal power, the proper role of America in the world — all of these issues and more that are still current today are on display, Berg says, in War. “The United States becomes a different country because of this war, and because of that, the world becomes a different place. Almost every theme we live with today goes directly back to World War I. ... I think modern America all comes from World War I.”