Cooking Shows
Cooking shows are unusually aired through the television. There are many television cooking shows that show the preparation of food in the studio set of a kitchen. The cooking show is usually hosted by a celebrity chef who prepares one or more dishes during the course of the cooking show. It is the job of the celebrity chef to take the audience present for the show through the preparation of the food during the different stages of cooking.
Cooking shows are meant to be partly educational where the host teaches the viewing audience the tricks and method to prepare different meals in each episode of the show. There are also a few cooking shows where the main idea of the show is only to provide entertainment to the audience.
Though cooking shows have not actually received top ratings quite often, it has always been an important part of daytime TV programming. Since the earliest days of television, there has been some cooking show or the other aired on the program. Cooking shows are generally inexpensive to produce, which is why it is a cheap and an easy option for TV stations to create a thirty minute or sixty minute TV episode.
You find numerous types of cooking shows on the television which have been sponsored by local TV stations or public broadcasting on different types of cooking. Some people watch the cooking shows for the type of cooking that is propagated through the cooking while others watch it just for the flamboyant hosts in them who have unique personalities that make them into celebrities.
The concept of a television cooking show was devised in the year 1942 where the Chef Dione Lucas was the chef here. The phrase ‘celebrity chef’ was not in vogue during this episode. Chef Lucas was a graduate of the Le Cordon Bleu cooking school of Paris who opened the London Cordon Bleu branch in the 1930s with Rosemary Hume, another graduate.
‘The French Chef’, Julia Child was responsible for making cooking shows famous after following in the footsteps of Dione Lucas. She was responsible for teaching America abut French coking through her book, mastering the Art of French Cooking. Her cooking show followed the book. On watching her cooking show, you find that Julia is a person who loves cooking, and teaches you the basics about cooking very well too.
The latest TV chefs in cooking shows include Jamie Oliver, Sara Moulton, Ming Tsai, Tyler Florence and many more. In fact, today you also find a television network dedicated only to cooking shows, called The Food Network. This is a channel that is very popular and offers cooking shows 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Some of the most famous cooking shows today are 30 minute meals, America’s Test Kitchen, The Cookin’ Cajun, Celebrity Cooks, the French Chef, Good Eats and Hippy Gourmet.