Shows You Can Sink Your Teeth Into

Since black-and-white television sets first made their debut in homes during the late 1940s, shows have come and gone with the times. But there is one genre that has remained a permanent fixture on America’s TV screens: the cooking show.

Kathleen Collins’ new book, Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows explores what’s been cooking on the airwaves since standard recipes were first shared on the radio in 1926 during a program called “Housekeeper’s Chat.”

Collins will be sharing the stories from her book at Fanwood Memorial Library Wednesday night from 7 - 8:30 p.m.

Cooking shows first captured Collins’ attention at the age of 3, when she was intrigued by the warmth and friendliness of Julia Child.

“My mom watched her. My grandmother watched her. I remember loving her right away,” Collins said.

Organized by decade, Watching What We Eat mirrors what is going on in American culture at large. After the end of World War II, Americans returned to home life in a big way, and cooking shows were very practical, Collins said.

“People moving to the suburbs, setting up house … home is the center of life … traditional meat and potatoes,” she said.

While it was trendy to focus on convenient gadgets and canned foods during the ’40s and ’50s, people started becoming more expressive in the ’60s and ’70s.

“Recipes were ambitious!” Collins said. “When Julia Child came on the air, a lot of people saw that this was a way to get creative.”

Then came the 1980s, when people worked all the time and made a lot of money. That is when microwave ovens became popular and people were more into dining out instead of trying recipes. Chefs gained a lot of attention and Wolfgang Puck made a name for himself.

“People may not have been in their kitchens cooking, but they were still learning about new foods,” Collins said. “It was the next step in culinary education of America.”

Everything came to a head in the 1990s when the Food Network came on the air. The number of hours of programming explored a wide range of all that could be done in the kitchen, not just in America, but all over the world.

When asked about the longevity of cooking shows, Collins explained that cooking is tied to our basic living. “All of us eat every day,” she said. “It’s so enmeshed in our daily lives. It’s not trendy. But, of course you can layer lots of trends to it.”

Kathleen Collins will be at the Fanwood Memorial Library, North Avenue and Tillotson Road, on Wednesday, June 24, from 7 - 8:30 p.m.

Collins lives in Manhattan and is a librarian at John Jay College.

For more information, go to: http://www.watchingwhatweeat.com/