The Best Cooking Shows Of All Time?

This list is put together by Thrillist so probably not the most authoritative source in the world, but it did get me thinking about the evolution of food-based television shows.

yahoo.com/food/the-24-best-cooking-shows-of-all-time-ranked

This list is pretty stacked towards shows created in the past 5-10 years, and contains a show that represents pretty much everything I dislike about what the Food Network has become.

The Food Network is no longer about food and cooking, but about the "food experience", as brought to us through the likes of Guy Fieri and his Grocery Games, or competitions like Hell's Kitchen were the show is really more about watching Gordon Ramsey act like a right swine and make people cry on TV than about cooking.

Or shows like Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives or Man Eats World, where hosts drive around and eat outrageous meals or specialties of certain local favourites.  Now, I don`t have any issues with these particular shows - at least they generally feature real chefs cooking real food, and someone experiencing it - but we don`t need a network fully stocked with only these shows or food-based game shows.

I do like Chopped and Top Chef tho - at least it is full of real chefs cooking real food and I learn something.

And once you hit their Top 10 Shows....I start to agree...and they get it right for the most part.  Naked Chef was fantastic, and I still adore Jamie Oliver. I loved Alton Brown's Good Eats. Iron Chef was a riot...the real Iron Chef from Japan, but Bobby Flay and Mario Batali did continually blow my mind in the American version.  The Two Fat Ladies is a classic.

However, the best modern cooking show I have ever seen is hands down Molto Mario.  #4?  The man is brilliant and knowledgeable beyond belief and so much fun to listen to.  I always wished I could get an invite to sit at his counter for this show.

And they missed Essence of Emeril which despite its low production value will always be better than Emeril Live in my mind. I learned so much about this style of cooking from him because it was about food and not about the Emeril franchise.  I did like the first few seasons of Emeril Live but then Emeril almost became a caricature of himself, where everything was `bam`this and `bam`that but it got people excited about food and cooking so I guess I can`t really fault him.

The one show they did forget for me at least was David Rosengarten`s Taste - if you like Alton Brown David would have been for you....this was intelligent cooking with a campy sense of humour.

And although he doesn't belong on the a list of the "best" cooking shows of all times, The Galloping Gourmet staring Graham Kerr still has so many memories of cooking for me and was probably the first actual cooking show I ever watched back in the 1970s.  Sorry Julia.

Then there was Yan Can Cook, staring Martin Yan, who despite the silly chopping antics and bad puns, brought the concept of Chinese cooking to North America.  I still have my Dad's old copy of his Yan Can Cook book.

In the end, the #1 show of all time is The French Chef. As it should be.

Julia truly defined this genre and every show on the air today owes its dues to Julia Child and The French Chef.  Julia really introduced the French way of cooking to a North American audience and made this style of cooking accessible to a whole generation that was starting to become obsessed with eating frozen dinners in foil pans on TV tables in front of the tube!

This is my favourite episode and one of my favourite recipes of her`s which I still make today.