Once Anthony Bourdain left The Food Network in a trail of acrimonious dust, he started a second television career on The Travel Channel. The show (”No Reservations”) was better (because, among other things, they allowed Anthony to be his acerbic, outrageous self) but he was gone from my life because the Travel Channel was not available from our cable company. We ordered episodes from Netflix, took them out of the library, and once, in a media coup that rivalled the day when my brother and I tuned in what we believed to be “porn”on the TV in the living room by fiddling rabbit ears and vertical hold, we found one episode of “No Reservations” on “On Demand,” and watched it with the fervor and intensity appropriate for a bootleg copy of Tommy and Pamela.
Then, one day, the Travel Channel appeared as I was flipping up towards the Premiums, bearing the portentous channel assignment “123.” (It’s portentous because I can remember it). We fell, that evening, under the spell of a young man named Adam Richman, and a show called “Man v. Food.” We fell hard. It is fabulous beyond all reckoning that we can now see “No Reservations” before the episodes are two years old, and there are a couple of other shows on the channel that we’ve enjoyed, but Richman is a revelation of how a network can combine really smart and really commercially appealing and create something that appeals to a large and diverse audience.
In 1944, Ella Mae Morse had a hit single that began:
I was recently given a gift of an out of print cookbook called The
Molly Goldberg Cookbook. When I first saw it I was amused and when I
opened it up, I immediately saw a cabbage recipe I wanted to make.
Score! Here was a cookbook that had that “Through The Looking Glass”
aspect to it. These were recipes long forgotten, mysterious in their
1950-ness, soon to be resurrected by me!
It is late Wednesday morning and Candy Sue Weaver is on the road again,
barreling through Arkansas. Her iPod is pumping Henry Gross, Eagles,
and Delbert McClinton through her radio and she is just as pumped. She
can taste victory up the road. Weaver is a sportswoman, and she is on a
700 mile drive in her pickup, trailer in tow, towards a baseball
diamond wedged between a cornfield and a soybean field in northwest
Illinois. But Weaver is not a baseball player. She is competition
barbecue cook.
I think it must be old age. Once upon a time, when a new restaurant
opened, my wife, Peggy, and I were the first in line. We would fight
for a reservation, make sure to try the newest new thing, and then tell
everyone we knew about our latest dining adventure. We just don’t do
that all that much anymore. Maybe we have gotten old.