Turn on the TV, and chances are you’ll stumble on a cooking show with just a click or two. Director Geoffrey Drummond has nurtured TV chefs from the days of Julia Child to today’s on-screen cookfest. Along the way he’s adapted to the changes in both technology and the public’s appetite for cooking programming. As always, his latest project is on the cutting edge: cooking on an even smaller screen—the iPad.
Gourmet Live: Your shows with Julia Child helped cooking to become a true TV phenomenon. What was she like to work with? Do you think Dan Aykroyd’s impression of her had a kernel of verisimilitude?
Geoffrey Drummond: Working with Julia was a joy and an inspiration. It was an amazing collaboration during which I learned so much from her, and not just about cooking and eating but about commitment, focus, and integrity in what you do and how you do it.
When I first started working with Julia, she made it absolutely clear to me that it was her name on the show, her name on the book, and that meant that she was going to be 100 percent involved with what was said and shown, including the way the show was produced (collegial, collaborative, congenial). The final product had to be something she was going to be proud to serve to her audience, no different from the roast chicken she would bring out to her dinner guests.
Julia did not think of herself as an entertainer; she was a teacher with a mission, and we all know what that was. But she was a great teacher, because she was an entertainer. She was smart, funny, and knew her stuff—deep down. She held to her core values, and never shied away from announcing them—often with a little twinkle of a smile, acknowledging that she might just be tweaking some raw nerves with the “food police.”
The Dan Aykroyd SNL piece really captured Julia’s drive and commitment to food and cooking, and did it with great humor as well as nuance. Julia and Paul [her husband] loved the piece. And, as well as being great comedy, it certified Julia’s status not so much as “The French Chef” but as “America’s Chef.” And it simultaneously introduced the idea, if not the term, “celebrity chef,” introducing her to an audience that went well beyond her PBS cooking fans, who already knew and loved her. In later years, Julia was the one who introduced many of America’s future celebrity chefs to television. From Alice Waters and Lidia Bastianich to Emeril Lagasse and Rick Bayless, In Julia’s Kitchen with Master Chefs introduced the best of two new generations of top chefs to a soon-to-be demographic called “foodies.”
GL: You’ve worked with so many renowned chefs since you started A La Carte Communications in 1990, such as Jacques Pépin, Lidia Bastianich, and Michael Chiarello. Any funny stories from shooting these food shows?
GD: Yes, one of the terrific benefits of producing and directing food shows is you get to learn how to cook, and you get to be the first to eat and drink what’s been cooked and poured. Working at Lidia Bastianich’s house in the early days of doing her show, there was a real family feel, and that’s because there was always Lidia’s real family on the set. Lidia’s mother, Erminia, was a constant presence (I called her the executive executive producer), along with Giovanni, Erminia’s live-in boyfriend; Lidia’s [then] husband, Felice; and often Lidia’s son and daughter, Joe and Tanya, as well. Over the years, grandchildren were added to the gallery.
As we set up cameras and lights in the morning, Lidia would be making Felice breakfast before going into makeup, and Giovanni would be engaging anybody who stopped working for a minute to discuss the upcoming Italian soccer league matches. Crew lunches were always in the backyard, again a famiglia. And I do remember a time when Lidia, knowing that I was an ardent fan of grappa, offered a tasting of her homemade infused grappa. Eliat, our video engineer, who could not say “no” to a taste of anything, went a bit overboard, not so much drinking the grappa, but eating the fruit that had spent most of its life soaking in grappa. We were—but should not have been—surprised to find Eliat fast asleep, head embossed by the myriad switches and knobs on the control board, and the video of our food looking nothing like what Lidia was cooking in the kitchen.
Julia and Jacques had a fabulous relationship; she adored and respected him but sometimes treated him as she would a brother, just wanting to get a bit under his skin. She would often switch planned ingredients at the last minute, knowing that it would upset Jacques’ sense of order, but also knowing that he was a master at handling what he came to call Cuisine Impromptu. On one show, Jacques was supposed to bone out a chicken; Julia switched it (planned by her, of course, and kept from Jacques) at the last minute to a turkey—much more dramatic-looking—and said, “Jacques, you are a great boner. Well, let’s see you bone this!”
GL: Why do you think TV is such a good medium for food, even though you can’t smell or taste the final product?
GD: It’s great storytelling structure. Cooking, eating: beginning, middle, and end. Nature and nurture. It’s of primal interest—it is totally natural to be interested in food. It is also nurtured, from childhood. As babies, we sit in the kitchen watching our food being cooked. We come together as family at the dinner table. Food is the medium through which we court our mates, get to know our clients, and celebrate our holidays, anniversaries, and life passages. Or at least we should. And food is great common matter for people to talk about, to share experiences, stories, and know-how.
Food and cooking shows are relatively—at least so far—inexpensive to produce. No big casts, no screenplays, limited locations, simple sets, and even in the world of celebrity chefdom, pretty modest talent costs.
GL: Are you surprised by the success of food TV, supporting two networks with countless others having their own shows?
GD: No…I’m actually surprised that the “food & cooking” category hasn’t evolved into sitcoms and episodics, since the subject matter has become so popular. (Lower production costs could be a part of that, as I mentioned earlier.) But the subject matter is really just an extension of the people—cooks and culinary adventurers—working in the category.
Like music, we’ve tapped into a great reservoir of terrific and appealing talent whom we enjoy watching do something we ourselves aspire to do. This is quite different from cops, lawyers, and doctors, whom we don’t aspire to be but we like watching the scripted dramas fictionalized and played out with actors, because the real cops and lawyers do not have the dramatic ability to act out the fictions created for them.
GL: What is your view of the reality food shows? Do you like or dislike any in particular?
GD: Are Top Chef and Hell’s Kitchen reality shows? Not much reality there—but lots of drama. Aren’t they all really about the “joy of victory” and the “agony of defeat”? We love seeing people triumph over the odds, and we also seem to love basking in people’s misery and ineptness, as well as misfortune. I also believe that it captures the possibility of upward mobility—becoming rich and famous, in this case a celebrity chef. It is easier to relate to becoming a great cook for the average person than being a basketball star, or recording a hit record, or starting a hedge fund—things you have to be born with or to. It feels like it is about merit and hard work, not natural athleticism or musical talent or coming from a place of high social access. I think that’s why casting is often skewed to mass-appeal contestants rather than anyone who might seem elitist (unless they are set up as the foil, to root against).
GL: How has technology and the expansion of the food world affected food shows on television? Do you show more or less? Assume more on the part of the viewer?
GD: Well, there certainly are more shows. And many more people interested in learning about, or should I say watching, food, from sourcing to cooking to eating. But audiences are still mostly interested in watching their favorite (or soon-to-be) hosts involved with food. They like the drama and magic, when it happens, of great cooking, but mostly are interested in vicarious eating. So fewer shows seem to be about “how to cook” and more seem to be about “the challenges of cooking,” or “I’m not the only one who messes up in the kitchen!”; and “adventures in eating—see and eat it all!”
Interestingly, new technologies are enabling you to see it all and learn how to cook it all as well. The iPad apps we are developing at CulinApp combine the best of how-to-cook TV video and complete recipe books that teach cooking on a one-to-one basis for those interested in learning, so they are much more than either e-cookbooks or cooking TV shows. The first one out is Dorie Greenspan’s Baking with Dorie; following that will be Pasta with Giuliano Hazan.
People have often asked: If so many people watch cooking shows, why don’t they cook more? One of the reasons often cited (I never believed it) was that you couldn’t watch and cook, because the TV wasn’t in the kitchen, and no matter how long a recipe took to cook, the show was always 25 minutes long. That’s no longer the case, and with these new apps, you can customize the instruction to your own familiarity and learning style. The apps are so interactive that it’s like having a cooking coach in the kitchen with you. Inspired by TV, instructed by app.
GL: Can you predict how TV cooking shows will look in the future? More reality-based, or will TV kitchen sets always have a place?
GD: Who could have predicted gourmet food trucks or pop-up patisseries? To me, Julia Child and America’s Test Kitchen are more “reality”-based than Top Chef. I do think food travel/adventure and culinary know-how, as opposed to cooking skill, will inhabit more and more of the food-TV landscape as a larger audience chooses to watch these shows. And those bigger audiences will justify increased advertising revenues, which will pay for shows like this, which cost more to produce than studio how-to. And, as I said above, more and more kitchen instruction will move to the Web and to apps.
GL: Do you have a favorite TV chef today? If so, what attracts you to their show?
GD: My favorite TV chef is Eric Ripert, whose show I produce and direct. He is a deeply talented, knowledgeable, capable, charming, honorable, and humble person who has great respect for what he cooks and how he cooks it. He brings an honesty and integrity to the food he cooks and the craft he works at, and he is able to articulate this in a direct, refreshing, and non-B.S. manner. I love working with Eric, and not a day in production passes where I don’t learn something or several things about cooking and eating, as well as have lots of laughs and fun packed into some life lessons.
Watch the episode of Avec Eric where we went on a wild-boar hunt in Chianti, got caught in a major thunderstorm, cinghiale crazily running away from hunters, dogs, and thunder, all equally crazed, and Eric (on camera) and myself (hiding behind cameraman), fearing that the pancetta and eggs for breakfast might have been our last meal. Yet after making it back to the hunting camp, we shared some vino fatto in casa as we dried off at the hunting lodge, and then settled into an amazing ragù of cinghiale. As Julia Child liked to say, “What fun we had!”
GL: If you had an unlimited budget and could produce any type of show, what would it be about?
GD: It would be a luscious transoceanic adventure show about fish—a combination of BBC’s Living Planet with Lost, and maybe a bit of Mondo Cane, the dedication of Jacques Cousteau, a script informed by Anthony Bourdain and Peter Matthiessen, and all hosted and tasted by Eric Ripert.
GL: What projects are you working on right now? Any beans you can spill?
GD: Yes, some version of the above with Eric Ripert; a celebration honoring Julia Child’s 100th birthday; and a baking series with Dorie and Joshua Greenspan’s cookie bars that literally “pop up” around the world, from Paris to Sydney to Tokyo to L.A., NYC…and…