In her sophomore year of college, Melissa d’Arabian studied abroad in France, living with a host couple in a town in the Loire Valley. Madame Gabillet cooked dinner every night, and a frequent dish was seared chicken with pan sauce. “She was not very extroverted,” d’Arabian recalls. “A little bit timid.” But as she watched her host cook with confidence in an everyday kind of way, d’Arabian, now 53 and a cookbook author, began to understand that the chicken was not so much a recipe as it was a strong technique. It was, she surmised, “real French cooking.”
Years later, in 2009, I was sitting on my parents’ couch in Atlanta the night d’Arabian cooked a dish on television inspired by Madame Gabillet’s chicken, which earned her the Season 5 crown on “The Next Food Network Star.” I was 18 and counting down the days until I might get to deglaze a pan on TV (and say the word “deglaze”) while competing for a shot at my own show. But what was my culinary point of view? Who was “Eric” on a plate? When I wasn’t baking box-mix cakes, I was practicing my presentation skills in front of the bathroom mirror.
It took several years for me to recognize the impact that those TV shows had on my life, on my palate and, most of all, on my cooking. “Food Network opened the doorway,” d’Arabian says, “and made it wider for people to come into the kitchen.” And I came swinging through, dusted in flour. I even worked there years ago, though it was in the editorial department of the website — my first food job out of college.
So many of the instincts I possess now as a cook can be credited to shows that ran in the late 1990s and early aughts. And there were other kids like me. We were Food Network Babies, a generation who came home from school to watch cooking programs before dinnertime. But if I found my after-school culinary tutors in Emeril Lagasse, Tyler Florence and Rachael Ray, then late-night episodes of “Unwrapped” and “$40 a Day” were my ritual before bed. By 13, I was lighting baked alaskas on fire because I had seen Gale Gand do it on “Sweet Dreams.” (I can still hear her closing tagline: “And remember, there’s always room for dessert.”)
