'Good Eats' brings television food to life

Food and television have turned out to be a tasty combination.

Cooking shows have been around for decades, with the late, great Julia Child as the obvious forerunner. But with the start of Food Network, and then with the popularity of shows like "Top Chef" and "Hell's Kitchen," food and the people who cook it have become something of a cultural phenomenon. How long that will remain true is anyone's guess.

In this occasional column, I'll talk about topics and trends related to food programming on TV. This will be a subjective column; I'll tell you what I like and don't like, not because there's anything special about my opinion, but just because that's what a review is -- a jumping-off place for discussion.

I figured that a good place to start is to write about my all-time favorite food-related show, and one of my favorite TV shows of any type, on any channel: "Good Eats."

Atlanta-based Alton Brown started the show in 1999, and it's been a staple of the Food Network schedule ever since. (You can tell how long the show has been on the air by watching Alton's hairline bounce around from one rerun to the next.)

The stereotypical cooking show features someone like Julia Child, standing behind a kitchen counter, cooking. "Good Eats" is about cooking, but its format throws in everything from science to sketch comedy. The show sometimes has a tongue-in-cheek storyline, with Alton battling a mad French chef in a James Bond parody or doing an episode about chili in character as a cowboy hero. One episode was a parody of the film "Misery," with a fan holding Alton prisoner and forcing him to teach her new potato recipes.

But while "Good Eats" has a sense of fun, it also imparts more and different information than any other food show. Alton tells you not only how to prepare a dish, but why it works that way -- for example, using styrofoam balls and push pins to demonstrate how an emulsion is formed as he explains the "do"s and "don't"s of homemade mayonnaise. And food experts like Shirley Corriher or Deb Duchon are brought in talk to about the history or science of food -- usually needling Alton about something in the process.

Alton spends more time than other TV chefs on the equipment of cooking. Sometimes, that means telling you what to look for in a skillet or a waffle iron or a set of knives. Sometimes, it means Alton's own homemade contraptions. For example, Alton's episode about how to make beef jerky avoided commercial dehydrators in favor of -- so help me -- a stack of air conditioning filters attached by bungee cord to a box fan. One of Alton's sayings -- and he has a million of them -- is that he hates single-use kitchen gadgets and allows only one "unitasker" in his kitchen: a fire extinguisher.

But for all the science and silliness, the show itself emphasizes basic recipes -- and that's why I've probably downloaded and prepared more "Good Eats" recipes from the Food Network web site than every other show on their schedule put together.

WHEN TO WATCH

"Good Eats" airs Monday through Friday nights at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. on Food Network, with additional airings at other times. Check foodnetwork.com for a complete list or for recipes from the show.

-- John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government. He is also the author of the self-published novel "Soapstone." His personal web site is lakeneuron.com.