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Paris Hilton doesn’t really know how to cook. This was evident during her pandemic-born “Cooking with Paris” YouTube series, in which she made her “infamous” Sliving Lasagna. “Sliving,” it should be noted, is Hilton’s new slogan; it is a coat rack for “killing” and “living”. (Although Hilton seems obsessed with “sliving” being one thing, it hasn’t caught on just yet.)
During the 15-minute video, Hilton, who was dressed in a shimmering rainbow shirt, spent an inordinate amount of time walking around her new kitchen for various utensils: a cheese grater, a spatula, something suitable for stirring five jars of ricotta.
She offered a few tips so offbeat that they almost signed up for camp. After adding too much salt to a bowl, Hilton demonstrated his “towel trick” of wiping off the excess with a damp paper towel. Despite the fact that Hilton forgot to add garlic and onion to her sauce, she showed how she actually brought a pair of sparkly sunglasses into the kitchen to put on while chopping onions so that its mascara does not run.
“Lasagna is very difficult to make,” she said. “Well, actually, I don’t think it is, but people think it does. But it’s actually really fun and really easy.
While the end product didn’t look too shabby – the lasagna had a golden brown, bubbly top after spending about 40 minutes in the oven – Hilton’s lack of culinary prowess is once again evident in her new Netflix series. , also titled “Cooking with Paris.”
The principle of the series is simple and, at first glance, does not deviate too much from the format of beloved cooking programs like “Barefoot Contessa”. Hilton chooses a theme for the dinner, goes out and does the shopping, decorates her home, and cooks a meal for a special guest. However, we’re not roasting chicken for Jeffrey here.
Instead, Hilton is doing things like paying an event company to wrap their dining room with thousands of white balloons while they make breakfast (read like: attempts to cut marshmallows that aren’t ready and burning French toast) with Kim Kardashian.
During the season, Hilton asks Siri, “What does the lemon peel mean?” She also asks a grocery store worker what chives look like and what you do with them. Hilton even spits her own food in the sink, and when a batch of ravioli doesn’t come out, pulls some of the pre-made Eataly variety out of her fridge while encouraging viewers to always have a back-up plan.
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Overall, the show feels like an elaborate joke, although Hilton is obviously in the game – a vanity project that seems more intended to sell a collection of “Sliving” oven mitts than to show skill. Still, watching the rainbow and glitter-adorned show, I wondered what we expected from cooking shows these days, anyway? Hilton isn’t the only celebrity to embark on organizing a contemporary stand-and-stir plus the fact that they are not a skilled cook.
Over the past year, Amy Schumer, Ludacris, and Selena Gomez (“Amy Schumer Learns to Cook,” “Luda Can’t Cook” and “Selena + Chef”, respectively) have all taken to similar gigs.
How exactly did we go from watching Jacques Pépin flip a perfect omelet with impeccable technique to watching Ludacris struggle to open an aluminum tin?
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One of the first cooking TV shows, “Cooks Night Out”, aired on the BBC in 1937. It was hosted by Marcel Boulestin, a French chef and restaurateur, who created a five-episode series in which he showed how to cook five different dishes, including an omelet, a fillet of sole Murat, a veal escalope Choisy, a salad and flambé pancakes. They can be cooked separately or in five courses.
As Mario Bustillos wrote in his essay “The Chef for All Ages”, the target audience for the show were upper class people who could afford very expensive televisions at the time, but whose home kitchen staff had already left for the evening.
By the time food television made its way to the United States in the 1940s, through beloved shows like “I Love to Eat” by James Beard and “The French Chef” by Julia Child, the tone was decidedly more egalitarian. Beard and Child’s passion for culinary education grew out of a love for good food. “Once you’ve mastered a technique, you hardly have to revisit a recipe,” Child said.
The Food Network was launched in 1993, with the original brand positioning of “TV for the people who cook”. The network’s original programming included Donna Hannover, Robin Leach, Emeril Lagasse and Jacques Pépin. During the year, the network also acquired the rights to the children’s library. And while the early years were successful for the burgeoning network, public interest exploded when the branding was changed in 1997 to become “TV for all who love to eat.”
It’s a subtle but significant change that signaled a shift in mainstream food media: You don’t have to be a good cook to take advantage of our programming. As long as you love to eat, our chefs can guide you.
Of course, Food Network was created, at least in part, to educate – but more than that, it was created to instill confidence in home cooks. Viewers who spend 30 minutes watching “Barefoot Contessa” or “East Meets West” end up feeling like they can cook like Ina Garten and Ming Tsai. That’s the magic of ambitious food television. As Allen Salkin, author of Food Network’s history book “From Scratch,” told me in 2017, thus began a “nearly two-decade tradition at Food Network of an underlying theme that everyone should be able to cook ”.
The concept that anyone can cook has also become the foundation for some of the network’s most popular shows. In 2005, “The Next Food Network Star” was launched. It has put talented home cooks alongside members of the industry in a competition to win their own cooking series. In 2016, the network released the “Cooks vs. Cons” series, which pitted two home cooks against two professionals to see which cooking skills reign supreme. Their identities are hidden from the judges until the very end.
Amateurs try to make judges believe they are a real boss, while pros just try to avoid the “embarrassment” of being beaten by a real estate agent or high school geography teacher.
“Everyone thinks they all want to be a chef,” Justice Geoffrey Zakarian said during a question-and-answer session on Food Network. “So it’s a lot of fun for people to imagine trying to fool someone like me and two judges into [believing they’re] a chef, so I think that piques their interest first. “
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As the Food Network continued to thrive – and following the publication of radically initiated books like Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” – the cultural perception of chefs also began to change. While the phrase “chefs are the new rockstars” has finally been repeated until parody (so much so that there was a festival in 2013 called CHEFStock), restaurants have become destinations for some diners who wanted to rub shoulders with a different kind of celebrity.
As chefs have become celebrities, some celebrities have sought recognition as chefs – or at least as talented cooks and entertainers. In 2012, singer Trisha Yearwood made her debut in “Trisha’s Southern Kitchen,” which won a Daytime Emmy the following year.
In 2015, actress Valerie Bertinelli launched her Food Network show “Valerie’s Home Cooking”, in which she was presented as “more than a successful actress” and “a cooking ace”. That same year, Tiffani Thiessen of “Beverly Hills: 90210” began hosting her Cooking Channel series “Dinner at Tiffani’s”. Also in 2015, former NFL player Eddie Jackson won “The Next Food Network Star” and remains in strong rotation on the network.
While there have been a few nods to the celebrity of the hosts – watching “Trisha’s Southern Kitchen”, for example, you knew it was only a matter of time before her husband and the Country Garth Brooks didn’t enter the kitchen – they otherwise functioned as a standard standing and stirring television show.
At one point, the genre of the cooking show went wrong once again, and people who didn’t know how to cook found themselves in the celebrity spotlight. In 2010, “Worst Cooks in America” debuted on Food Network. The principle was simple: two famous chefs take it upon themselves to transform useless home cooks into seasoned semi-pros. While it can be argued that the show was a modern, albeit slightly sarcastic, interpretation of the “anyone can cook” network ethic, it also elevated amateurism as entertainment.
This is not a surprising development; Reality TV has long exploited the trials and tribulations of average people for drama and scowl, and countless viewers are ready for this type of show. From this whirlwind of entertainment, education, amateurs and celebrities is born this new kind of culinary programming: celebrities who have trouble wielding a knife but who will still try to host a cooking show.
Maybe it’s because they are really interested in becoming better home cooks; for what it’s worth, that seems to be the case for Gomez, whose “Selena + Chef” show features her virtually alongside experts like Angelo Sosa, Antonia Lofaso, Candice Kumai, Daniel Holzman, Ludo Lefebvre, Nancy Silverton, Nyesha Arrington, Roy Choi and Tanya Holland.
For some of the other hosts, I feel like these were just pandemic projects. As production schedules, tours and concerts came to a screeching halt, celebrities noticeably disagreed. (Remember the misguided celebrity coverage of “Imagine”?) Walking into the kitchen maybe seemed like an easy way to connect with your fan base.
I’m not sure that’s necessarily a bad thing. It is natural that as a genre continues to develop, a spectrum begins to develop. The Olympics are broadcast alongside “Wipeout”. You have high-profile dramas and “F-boy Island”. And “Chef’s Table” is available on the same streaming service as “Cooking with Paris”. After all, anyone can cook.
For more stories on how food television (and our relationship with it) has changed over time, read these:
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