The only U.K. cooking shows I ever watched regularly were Floyd on Fish, and some of his later shows Floyd on Food. He threw out a lot of the dishes he made, once he tasted them. I did watch Two Fat Ladies occasionally but absolutely never made any of the dishes that they made. In fact, British cuisine is not part of my repertoire, but I understand that it is more popular on the East Coast and in Canada. I did recently buy the book Floyd on Fish, and it looks fairly reasonable.

Lars

Before Food Network and other cooking shows popped up, cooking shows werre pretty much only on PBS channels... Julia Child, Graham Kerr, Jeff Smith. If I had a choice, would definitely go with savory/salty over sweet. BUT when Justin Wilson came along, even I knew a lot of his dishes couldn't possibly be edible from the amount of SALT he'd DUMP in?? Have seen some chefs say "2 T of butter" and it's obviously half a stick??

The Two Fat Ladies' Shooter's sandwich is great for picnics :-)

It's amazing many of them never clean their hands after handling pork, chicken, eggs, etc. and start touching everything else.

dcarch

Modern TV British chefs are much better. Jamie Oliver, Heston Blumenthal....... a whole host of michelin starred chefs..... Michel Roux jnr, Raymond Blanc........ fantastic. Wonderful every-day food from Gino DiCampo...... I could ramble on for days,!

US TV Chefs aren't much better, unless they are specifically cooking "healthy" recipes, and even those aren't always so healthy. They are generally loaded with butter and oil and eggs. I have to modify all their recipes to make something I can eat.

I'm sure if the study had been done here, it would have the same outcome.

Here is the study:

http://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e7607

The study used the five top selling cookbooks by a TV chef, per Amazon.uk:

Oliver J. Jamie�s 30 minute meals. Michael Joseph, 2010.
Pascale L. Baking made easy. HarperCollins, 2011.
Oliver J. Jamie�s ministry of food. Michael Joseph, 2008.
Lawson N. Kitchen: recipes from the heart of the home. Chatto and Windus, 2010.
Fearnley-Whittingstall H. River Cottage everyday. Bloomsbury, 2009.

Then 100 recipes were randomly selected from among the "main meals" recipes in these books. "Main meals" was defined as:

"We included meals if they were designed to be eaten hot, they were not described as being suitable for special occasions only or for breakfast, they were not soups, they included substantive items from at least two of the EatWell groups of the FSA,24 and the recommended serving size was at least 225 g.

We chose these inclusion criteria to generate a comparable sample of ready meals and recipes created by television chefs that might be considered as typical main dishes for everyday consumption. We excluded soups because they are not always consumed as main dishes.25 26 In restricting meals to those dishes including substantive items from at least two of the EatWell groups24 and with a recommended serving size of at least 225 g we ensured that no items intended as side dishes (for example, prepared mashed potato, bubble and squeak) were inadvertently included�particularly in the ready meals sample."

The ingredients list in each recipe was then input into a nutritional calculator from www.windiets.com.

The nutritional criteria used to assess the TV chef recipes and the ready-made meals were:

World Health Organization. Population nutrient intake goals for preventing diet-related chronic diseases. Diet, nutrition and the prevention of chronic diseases. WHO, 2003;54-9.

Food Standards Agency. Front-of-pack traffic light signpost labeling: technical guidance. 2007. www.food.gov.uk/multimedia/pdfs/frontofpackguidance2.pdf.

I am not familiar with these.

Anyone have these books? Want to pick a couple of recipes and eyeball the ingredients, or run the ingredients list through an online calculator? E.g. on Calorie Count you can input a recipe and get a nutritional analysis - fat, protein, carbs, vitamins, etc.

I am curious enough to maybe pick up one of these cookbooks at Powells today. Any one you'd recommend? I sometimes watch "Jamie At Home" and have seen Nigella Lawson's programme once or twice, but don't know much about them otherwise.

I find Chris Kimball, the guy on America's Test Kitchen, to have a really heavy hand with the salt. Just my opinion.

I really get a kick out of the Two Fat Ladies. Seemingly unconcerned about fat, eggs, salt...

I really miss the Two Fat Ladies. Very few of their recipes interested me as far as making but watching those two tax the daylight out of that poor Triumph and the sniping back and forth... just a very entertaining show! Although that apple coffee cake the one made that rolled the dough out to cover the tabletop, fill it with apples and roll it up... that looked GOOD!

Ken, The Two Fat Ladies was our favourite.

~Ann

Jamie Oliver's books are all interesting. Nigella is very glam but doesn't worry about butter. Hugh F-W's books are excellent. I love the veg every day book. Baking is - well - baking. Treats, not every day food. She's a lovely girl, though.

Another fan of Two Fat Ladies, even though I didn't make any of their food. I miss them as well--so entertaining!

I find that Yotam Ottolenghi's recipes are outstanding!

You can Google "youtube ottolenghi" and come up with some videos. I'm not sure if he's on BBC TV or what, but he writes a weekend food column for The Guardian.

Here is a link that might be useful: A bit more info/Ottolenghi

It's amazing many of them never clean their hands after handling pork, chicken, eggs, etc. and start touching everything else.

Thank you for that! Do you ever see any of them WASH their hands? Seems like they only wipe them on their aprons. I'm washing my hands every two minutes if I'm touching something sticky, greasy, or whatever. Wiping isn't the same and anything you touch afterwards is going to be sticky and gross.

As far as the health of the recipes - one reason most restaurant food in a French restaurant tastes so much better than what people often do at home is because the food is swimming in butter. And it's usually good butter.

But for the most part people aren't overweight because they're eating too much high-quality butter and cheese. It's because they're eating too much.

Period.

And substituting a low fat version of something isn't going to make all that much difference if you've been snacking all day. Just a little piece of chocolate, just a little caramel, a donut, etc. It all adds up.

For those who are over 30, ever notice how kids play today? When I was small, we'd play all day long and didn't want to come home. Riding bikes, playing softball, or whatever. Today kids have play dates but the weird part is that they bring snacks!

Really? There's a danger they might fall over dead of starvation? The guy who first pointed that out to me was a refugee from Somalia! He knew about hunger and thought it was so strange that American kids can't go anywhere w/out snacks in their backpacks. It doesn't matter whether the snacks are carrots or candy, the idea is that kids are always eating.

I have a number of friends from Europe and elsewhere and they've all commented on that custom as it seems so strange to them. We train kids from infancy that they're never supposed to feel hunger, and then we satiate ourselves with whatever is at hand, which often as not is some prepackaged snack or fast food.

I stopped watching cooking shows when they started becoming contests where people with copious tattoos were judged by illiterate non-cooks, or even worse, they were hand-held camera shots with jump-cuts that serve only to annoy because you know they're trying to make things seem a lot more exciting than they really are, so I can't say a lot about most of them except that I did like to watch Nigella. With the sound on or off; doesn't matter. Giada De Laurentiis is my new fave.

But as for actual cooking skills, it's only Lidia and Jacques Pepin. Hopefully w/out his annoying daughter.

I agree, they are not very healthy. It would be nice if they were more about how to feed your family without spending two hours in the kitchen and dirtying every dish you own, but I guess that doesn't suck people in. I kind of think that anyone that famous has a moral obligation to teach people to use fat and sugar to best advantage. There is not much skill or art in just frying it and then putting gravy on it, or drowning it in butter and sugar. If they filmed chefs feeding their families every day, I would be fascinated by that. I suspect it would look quite different- a lot of one-pot meals, no-cook side dishes, etc.

It's amazing many of them never clean their hands after handling pork, chicken, eggs, etc. and start touching everything else.

YES, thank you dcarch. EWWW!! Anne Burrell does wash up, with soap, but then she throws handfuls of salt into everything. Lydia and Jacques are two of my favorites as well. And Rick Bayless and Daisy Martinez, too. Between the four of them I've learned a lot about technique, which is my whole reason for watching. I can look up/make up recipes,and I don't especially want to do it in less than 30 minutes with 5 ingredients under $10, either. And by the way, I don't think $10 is especially cheap for a home made dinner for 4.

Wow, I sound like a snob. :-)

Cj

Well, Paula Deen is diabetic now, you know. Her son warned her and she scoffed.

Actually the very idea that we watch people cooking dinner for entertainment is rather strange, considering the shows are on the Food Network every day, all day, instead of once a week like the old days when cooking shows were an occasional treat.

And yes, I think it is rather odd that the trend is for our kids to be always eating, because it is something to do. Heavan forbid our kids just "hang out." When I was a kid, the ethos was that kids entertained themselves. My parents rarely cared whether we were bored or not, that was our problem. We only got noticed when we got into trouble or started bugging them, and then we just got yelled at. And I grew up relatively happy and unscathed! :)

But I will say that I was lucky in that my mom clamped down on my junk food desires when I was a kid, and taught me to eat healthy--no loading up with soda, cookies, chips, kool aide. It was fruit, raw veggie snacks, whole grains, etc. At the time I thought she was the meanest mom on the block!! Luckily I like all food, good for me or not, so it is easy for me to fill up on healthy stuff, I actually prefer it. Most of the TV stuff looks kinda gross and overly rich to me.