The Importance of Being Alton

Once upon a time in America, there was food and there was cuisine. Food was what everyone ate. You ate whatever your mother made or whatever your wife's mother taught her to make. It was generations of knowledge dedicated to making whatever you had palatable, refined over countless mealtimes and the hushed swapping of information in social circles. It was informed by your heritage and the slow degradation of your ancestral home's food culture into whatever fit into the American lifestyle and culture. Cuisine, though- cuisine was what you found in the restaurants. What you spent the big bucks on. And cuisine, quite literally, came from France. It was the result of decades of tinkering and thinking about food, the passionate pursuit of men who did nothing but cook, turning ingredients into something bigger and better through some magic sorcery you had to go to France to learn. It was cooking in its purest form.

Then World War 2 happened. We sent our men away, halfway across the world, and all we gave them was something not quite food in little tins. So when they had the opportunity to eat something that didn't come from a little tin, they took it. And suddenly, they realized what else was food. The Italians, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Germans, the Spanish, the Turks...all of those minorities back home? They also had food. And it tasted good. Here, outside of America, that food was still pure and delicious. It wasn't cuisine, either. You didn't need black magic to make it. So they came back, much to everyone's surprise, with those memories of different food lingering. American food could be more and they demanded more. Sure, they molded it back to fit America- no food survives the trip to the New World. But it was different. Things were changing.

Then, enter The Woman. Quite literally a giant in American culinary history, someone every American cook speaks of with fondness and reverence- Julia Child. Smart and curious, she looked at cuisine and said- "Why, this is just food. Anyone can make this, right?" Pan in one hand, wine in the other, she tried to prove it. And with a book and a TV show, she came into American homes and said "You can cast the secret spells of the French. You can make cuisine." And America believed her and begin to do real French cooking in their own homes. You didn't need restaurants- you just needed tenacity and a will to cook. But still, there was magic in that cooking. After all, Julia could put a turkey in the oven, then pull it out fully cooked!

And that's how it stayed for decades. Slowly, the rest of the world seeped into America's kitchens and restaurants and we watched Julia and a handful of other people cook on TV, learning the secret recipes to make better food at home. They were the gatekeepers and translators of those secrets and only those willing to be lectured to and figure it out as they went could really access it.

So, a guy from Georgia with a film degree and a culinary school degree thought it would be fun, maybe, to make a cooking show with more interesting angles. Maybe throw some history and science into the mix. Do a bit more than just give a recipe and prepare it while a fully cooked version is sitting in the oven.

Maybe Alton Brown understood what he was doing, maybe he didn't, but it had one major effect: he killed the magic and the mystification. There was science behind making a roux. There's a reason you cook it for a particular time and you prepare it in the order you do. There was no magic in that sludge to thicken your sauce. There was no French god deciding you had done the ritual correctly. It was learnable and even something easy to intuit. And with a gift for entertainment and a desire to actually teach people, Alton recreated America's kitchens. He gave America the vocabulary and knowledge to understand the reality of food- that cuisine might require more finesse, patience, and knowledge, but that's not inaccessible to you. You can use not just the same recipes, but the same techniques in your own kitchen. You can not just cook- you can create. Have fun.

Good Eats might be one of the single most important pieces of American culture in the last 20 years. Before Good Eats, there were food critics, the people who spent their lives learning about food and flavor and telling other people what to think, but now everyone is a foodie- loving to eat, loving to explore a culinary landscape that's been blown wide open. Before Good Eats, the Food Network was a ridiculous concept- who wants to watch people make recipes for 24 hours a day? After Good Eats, there are culinary shows on even the broadcast networks- on top of Food Network being so successful that they had to create a spinoff network just to have the people standing around cooking again.

So, when I listen to his podcast, I realize that Alton hasn't really stopped there with Good Eats. Each episode, he talks to celebrity chefs and cooking show contestants and he's once again doing something vital and unprecedented: he's giving access to the major figures of a culture he was instrumental in creating and breaking down the barriers of even the new food world. Talking one-on-one with Bobby Flay or Geoffery Zakarian, not in the context of "let's have a serious interview, please tell me about your new show," but as a real conversation to bring them to the levels of humans whose profession you love to watch on TV and whose skills you want to mimic in your home. They're fascinating, yes, but again...they're not magicians. And he's having these conversations about the impact of food and food culture not in edited sound bites, but in real, interesting discussions. And maybe it's an accident or design, but roughly half of each episode of the Alton Browncast is devoted to a major figure of the food world, while the other half is devoted to talking to his audience directly via phone or email, and Alton has once again positioned himself as a willing and eager bridge between the two. Maybe he's legitimately that brilliant in being a force of shaping the food culture of America or maybe he's just a dude with good ideas and some luck in being in the right place at the right time, but he has been, continues to be, and possible will be into the future, a driver of the culinary awakening that happened during this century.