Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | 384.5522 SAL | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | 384.5522 SAL | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
An Entertainment Weekly Best Tell-All of 2013!
"Allen Salkin shows how the sausage really gets made at the Food Network in From Scratch , a behind-the-scenes history liberally spiced with gossip and unsavory tidbits."-- Entertainment Weekly
"A detailed look at the network from start-up phase to the present, with a generous lump of juicy stories about the network's most polarizing figures--Guy Fieri, Bobby Flay, Anthony Bourdain and, of course, Paula Deen y'all--heaped on top."-- The Atlantic Wire
Big personalities, high drama--the extraordinary behind-the-scenes story of the Food Network, now about to celebrate its twentieth anniversary: the business, media, and cultural juggernaut that changed the way America thinks about food.
In October 1993, a tiny start-up called the Food Network debuted to little notice. Twenty years later, it is in 100 million homes, approaches a billion dollars a year in revenue, and features a galaxy of stars whose faces and names are as familiar to us as our own family's.
But what we don't know about them, and the people behind them, could fill a book.
Based upon extensive inside access, documents, and interviews with hundreds of executives, stars, and employees all up and down the ladder, Allen Salkin's book is an exhilarating roller-coaster ride from chaos to conquest (and sometimes back). As Salkin takes us inside the conference rooms, studios, homes, restaurants, and after-hours meetings, we see a salty Julia Child lording it over the early network performers; a fragile Emeril Lagasse staggering from the sudden public shock of cancellation; a very green Rachael Ray nearly burning down the set on her first day; a torn Tyler Florence accepting the Applebee's job he knows he can't refuse, but with a chill running down his spi≠ a determined Bobby Flay reinventing himself once again to survive.
Paula Deen, Tom Colicchio, Anthony Bourdain, Mario Batali, Jamie Oliver, Martha Stewart, Guy Fieri, Cat Cora: Salkin illuminates the people we thought we knew, and the ones we never knew about, in this irresistible story of the intersection between business, television, pop culture, food--and us.
Author Notes
ALLEN SALKIN has been a journalist for such publications as New York magazine, The Village Voice , and Details . As a reporter for The New York Times , he wrote hundreds of features about food, culture, and media. He lives in New York City.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The Food Network has risen from obscurity and ridicule in the early '90s to become a powerhouse of cable television, transforming chefs like Emeril Lagasse and Paula Deen into celebrities and changing food culture forever. With a light wit and balanced perspective, Salkin, a former food and media reporter for the New York Times, presents the definitive history of the network from inception to the present day. Food Network devotees will delight at the inside knowledge of internal scandals, the intriguing biographies of their favorite star chefs, and an exclusive look at the ever-shifting lineup of executives and parent companies. The first act, detailing how the network was conceived, funded, and staffed, is tremendously dry and provides little entertainment, making it almost impenetrable for all but the network's most devoted fans. Once the stage is set, however, Salkin moves deftly between periods in the channel's development, garnishing the narrative with frequent quotes from influential personalities to add depth. Referring to nearly everyone by his or her first name makes for inevitable confusion, but patient readers will eventually uncover a nuanced and rich tale of an empire that no one expected to survive. Agent: Eric Lupfer, William Morris Endeavor (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
NOT LONG AGO, this big, messy country united. Culinarily, at least. We all sat down to our Thanksgiving tables and ate (mostly) the same thing at (mostly) the same time, before retreating to our big, messy corners to cook and eat the diverse, constantly evolving cuisine we call American. The latest batch of narrative food books (not to be confused with strictly recipe-driven cookbooks) explores some of those corners, reminding us how food defines who we are (Patriots? Capitalists? Shameless Worshipers of Celebrity?), where we've been and - perhaps most American of all - who we want to be. IN NINA MUKERJEE FURSTENAU'S memoir, BITING THROUGH THE SKIN: An Indian Kitchen in America's Heartland (University of Iowa, paper, $19), the author uses family recipes to bridge two worlds: the small Midwestern town of Pittsburg, Kan., where she grew up, and, a universe away, her parents' and grandparents' native Bengal. The book is structured in the format preferred and perfected by Molly Wizenberg ("A Homemade Life"), Luisa Weiss ("My Berlin Kitchen") and food bloggers everywhere: personal story followed by recipe featured in personal story. If one of the metrics of success in this genre is to get you into the kitchen, Furstenau's got that one covered. Her food memoir, though, is less concerned with the proper amount of ginger in the dal than it is with the classic immigrant's search for belonging. "There I was playing softball, riding my 10-speed, and going to the Dairy Queen," she writes, "eyes bright, fingers sticky, all the while losing my identity." Her childhood was one where chickpea flour sat in the pantry beside the allpurpose white, where Huntley and Brinkley read the national news as the family dined on murgi and payesh. These dishes "spelled trouble" to her father, who feared the clingy clove-y aromas would make the house smell of "otherness." He worked out an elaborate venting system for just such occasions. Furstenau's struggle becomes particularly acute in the late 1970s, when she's an angst-ridden teenager suddenly frustrated that her friends don't understand the world she comes from, even as she struggles to understand it herself. In a chapter called "All Our Tupperware Is Stained With Turmeric" (nailed that one) she decides the answer is to be found - where else? - at the dinner table. She will help her mother prepare a traditional Bengali feast for her burger-and-fries-loving pals. "What is this exactly," one of them asks, and in one swipe of her fork brushes both the curry and the author's search for who exactly she is to the side of the plate. It should be noted that the recipe for the keema - a minced meat curry - following this story had me combing the county for cardamom pods. USING THE dinner plate as a mirror of one's identity isn't a novel concept, but that doesn't mean it can't be fun. In the engrossing THREE SQUARES: The Invention of the American Meal (Basic Books, $27.99), Abigail Carroll lays down some historical context, reminding us that in America who you are and where you came from are less important than where you are now and where you hope to go - preferably as efficiently and in as well-packaged a form as possible. No era demonstrates this point better than the Industrial Revolution, which bumped dinnertime - traditionally a midday recharging period for men in the fields - to the family-centric evening ritual we now know and revere. During this period, dinner became a signifier of class - midday eaters were seen as lower class and provincial, while those who had white-collar office jobs came home to a meal at night. "Dining together in the evening," Carroll observes, "helped the middle-class Victorian family to understand itself as a family, and this new understanding made the meal so much more than a meal. Now it was a ritual." Beyond covering the evolution of breakfast, lunch, dinner and even the insidious snack time, Carroll also charts how American food has been politicized, signaling not just what social class you belong to but, in some cases, how loyal you are. During the Revolutionary era, corn represented the Colonies because it was a native crop. "Luxury and self-indulgence became politicized as offenses against the state," Carroll explains. "Hardly any breakfast was plainer than milk and maize. Hardly any breakfast was more patriotic." THAT VERY AMERICAN impulse to claim ownership - and to define our separate experiences through food - is on full display in Peggy Wolff's FRIED WALLEYE AND CHERRY PIE: Midwestern Writers on Food (University of Nebraska, paper, $19.95). As with most anthologies, the quality of the writing is uneven, but Heartland natives will embrace the recipes, if not the remembrances of State Fair corn dogs and Lake Michigan fish boils, German kuchen and tamales eaten on Chicago's Maxwell Street, a.k.a. "the Ellis Island of the Midwest." Many of the essayists - including two former Times columnists, Molly O'Neill (Columbus, Ohio) and Peter Meehan (suburban Chicago) - address the Midwest's status as the capital of the industrial food complex. ("You lose more than corn when you lose your cornfields," O'Neill's father said when farmland was razed to create shopping malls.) But it's a moment in Donna Pierce's essay, "The Black Migration," that provides the tidiest resolution to the question of American identity. In the early 1950s, Pierce's parents moved from Alabama to Missouri, where they hoped to raise their children far from segregation. Her mother never stopped serving gumbo and Creole specialties, but also made plenty of room in her repertory for the beef stews and apple cobblers of the Midwest. One morning, when Pierce's father was pining for his days of Gulf Coast papayas and mangos, her mother passed him the apple butter and declared for all to hear: "Bloom where you are planted." I think Nina Mukerjee Furstenau would have appreciated the conviction. PERHAPS NONE OF these new food books personify the American story better than Allen Salkin's dishy, behindthe-scenes FROM SCRATCH: Inside the Food Network (Putnam, $27.95). For those with a keen interest in cable television and how many subscribers the Food Network had in South Bend, Ind., in 2003, this book is your "MobyDick." For everyone else, it's salacious enough to keep you swinging from one good old-fashioned bootstrap story to the next. All the Single Name Celeb Chefs are represented - Emeril, Bobby, Mario, Jamie, Nigella, Rachael, Ina - evolving into superstars (and, eventually, brands) as the Food Network capitalized on America's obsession with cooking shows and democratized the linen-and-lobster world of fine cuisine. It's particularly hard to resist the stories about Rachael Ray, who, Salkin reports, was a natural right from the start ("She was gold - so obviously appealing") and who was plucked from upstate obscurity to become the celebrity she is today. But that almost wasn't the case. After Ray killed her national television debut on the "Today Show," she tried to talk her way out of being hired by the Food Network. "You're Champagne, I'm beer out of the bottle," she supposedly told the suits. "I clearly don't belong here, I'm not a chef." And, of course, that's why they wanted her, mirroring the new mission for the network, "where cooking was less important than the cook." Thus began the meteoric rise of the onetime Macy's salesgirl, with only "filament-thin tethers to the world of fine food," who now reigns over one of the country's largest culinary media empires. Only in America. JENNY ROSENSTRACH is the author of "Dinner: A Love Story," a book inspired by her blog of the same name. on murgi and payesh. These dishes "spelled trouble" to her father, who feared the clingy clove-y aromas would make the house smell of "otherness." He worked out an elaborate venting system for just such occasions. Furstenau's struggle becomes particularly acute in the late 1970s, when she's an angst-ridden teenager suddenly frustrated that her friends don't understand the world she comes from, even as she struggles to understand it herself. In a chapter called "All Our Tupperware Is Stained With Turmeric" (nailed that one) she decides the answer is to be found - where else? - at the dinner table. She will help her mother prepare a traditional Bengali feast for her burger-and-fries-loving pals. "What is this exactly," one of them asks, and in one swipe of her fork brushes both the curry and the author's search for who exactly she is to the side of the plate. It should be noted that the recipe for the keema - a minced meat curry - following this story had me combing the county for cardamom pods. USING THE dinner plate as a mirror of one's identity isn't a novel concept, but that doesn't mean it can't be fun. In the engrossing THREE SQUARES: The Invention of the American Meal (Basic Books, $27.99), Abigail Carroll lays down some historical context, reminding us that in America who you are and where you came from are less important than where you are now and where you hope to go - preferably as efficiently and in as well-packaged a form as possible. No era demonstrates this point better than the Industrial Revolution, which bumped dinnertime - traditionally a midday recharging period for men in the fields - to the family-centric evening ritual we now know and revere. During this period, dinner became a signifier of class - midday eaters were seen as lower class and provincial, while those who had white-collar office jobs came home to a meal at night. "Dining together in the evening," Carroll observes, "helped the middle-class Victorian family to understand itself as a family, and this new understanding made the meal so much more than a meal. Now it was a ritual." Beyond covering the evolution of breakfast, lunch, dinner and even the insidious snack time, Carroll also charts how American food has been politicized, signaling not just what social class you belong to but, in some cases, how loyal you are. During the Revolutionary era, corn represented the Colonies because it was a native crop. "Luxury and self-indulgence became politicized as offenses against the state," Carroll explains. "Hardly any breakfast was plainer than milk and maize. Hardly any breakfast was more patriotic." THAT VERY AMERICAN impulse to claim ownership - and to define our separate experiences through food - is on full display in Peggy Wolff's FRIED WALLEYE AND CHERRY PIE: Midwestern Writers on Food (University of Nebraska, paper, $19.95). As with most anthologies, the quality of the writing is uneven, but Heartland natives will embrace the recipes, if not the remembrances of State Fair corn dogs and Lake Michigan fish boils, German kuchen and tamales eaten on Chicago's Maxwell Street, a.k.a. "the Ellis Island of the Midwest." Many of the essayists - including two former Times columnists, Molly O'Neill (Columbus, Ohio) and Peter Meehan (suburban Chicago) - address the Midwest's status as the capital of the industrial food complex. ("You lose more than corn when you lose your cornfields," O'Neill's father said when farmland was razed to create shopping malls.) But it's a moment in Donna Pierce's essay, "The Black Migration," that provides the tidiest resolution to the question of American identity. In the early 1950s, Pierce's parents moved from Alabama to Missouri, where they hoped to raise their children far from segregation. Her mother never stopped serving gumbo and Creole specialties, but also made plenty of room in her repertory for the beef stews and apple cobblers of the Midwest. One morning, when Pierce's father was pining for his days of Gulf Coast papayas and mangos, her mother passed him the apple butter and declared for all to hear: "Bloom where you are planted." I think Nina Mukerjee Furstenau would have appreciated the conviction. PERHAPS NONE OF these new food books personify the American story better than Allen Salkin's dishy, behindthe-scenes FROM SCRATCH: Inside the Food Network (Putnam, $27.95). For those with a keen interest in cable television and how many subscribers the Food Network had in South Bend, Ind., in 2003, this book is your "MobyDick." For everyone else, it's salacious enough to keep you swinging from one good old-fashioned bootstrap story to the next. All the Single Name Celeb Chefs are represented - Emeril, Bobby, Mario, Jamie, Nigella, Rachael, Ina - evolving into superstars (and, eventually, brands) as the Food Network capitalized on America's obsession with cooking shows and democratized the linen-and-lobster world of fine cuisine. It's particularly hard to resist the stories about Rachael Ray, who, Salkin reports, was a natural right from the start ("She was gold - so obviously appealing") and who was plucked from upstate obscurity to become the celebrity she is today. But that almost wasn't the case. After Ray killed her national television debut on the "Today Show," she tried to talk her way out of being hired by the Food Network. "You're Champagne, I'm beer out of the bottle," she supposedly told the suits. "I clearly don't belong here, I'm not a chef." And, of course, that's why they wanted her, mirroring the new mission for the network, "where cooking was less important than the cook." Thus began the meteoric rise of the onetime Macy's salesgirl, with only "filament-thin tethers to the world of fine food," who now reigns over one of the country's largest culinary media empires. Only in America. JENNY ROSENSTRACH is the author of "Dinner: A Love Story," a book inspired by her blog of the same name.
Kirkus Review
Fact-packed insider dish on the unlikely rise to prominence of the Food Network. In his debut, former New York Times food reporter Salkin serves up a heaping portion of cable TV history on the Food Network: from its humble beginnings in 1993, broadcasting from murky, rat-infested studios, to the culinary-themed reality TV behemoth it is today. The author introduces us to all the major personalities that helped further the popularity of the network over the years: Julia Child, Emeril Lagasse, Bobby Flay, Rachael Ray, Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali, among many other foodie luminaries. Salkin's writing is more nuts-and-bolts reportage-oriented and research-heavy, and he is not always meticulous about separating the wheat from the chaff regarding indispensable facts and anecdotes. Nevertheless, the author gives a reasonably vivid sense of the machinations that took the Food Network from their original blueprint of traditional, by-the-numbers cooking shows to ownership under corporate giant Scripps and their innovative new wave of sexy culinary melodrama in the vein of Iron Chef. Salkin also charts how, not surprisingly, the Food Network went from a loose, anything-goes business model to a more conservative, risk-averse operation by the 2000s, when executives began to turn more toward focus-group surveying and statistics rather than rely on their own gut feelings or instincts for what kinds of shows would appeal to the public. As it turns out, only a few of the network's mainstays, such as Bobby Flay, for instance, have what it takes to change with the times and tastes of viewers over the years. Obsessively detailed, but often too exhaustive for its own good.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Today, the Food Network is a household name, grossing $1 billion in yearly revenue and reaching 100 million homes. In this comprehensive chronicle, journalist Salkin traces the history of the station from its inception in the early 1990s (when its first headquarters was merely a three-room apartment) to its current status as a top-ten cable network. Drawing on extensive research and interviews, Salkin gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at the figures who built the network and the development of popular shows such as Iron Chef and Good Eats. He also tracks the rising fame of its stars, including chefs Emeril Lagasse, Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, Tyler Florence, Rachael Ray, Paula Deen, and Guy Fieri, detailing dramas such as the cancellation of Emeril Live and Anthony Bourdain's vocal criticism of the network and many of its stars. Verdict Readers may be tempted to skim over the more tedious bits about lesser-known executives to get to the juicy details of well-known celebrities. Nevertheless, this thorough history will appeal to those with an interest in food celebrities and television.-Melissa Stoeger, Deerfield P.L., IL (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
PROLOGUE A Final Toast to Emeril Live I have never met another guy who could walk into a room with, like, two hundred people and somehow find the one person that needed the hug the most," says a tearful Susie Fogelson as she raises a cham pagne glass to Emeril Lagasse. The head of marketing for Food Network, Susie pauses to avoid choking up in front of thirty executives and staffers gathered in the network's central kitchen in New York City. "He would be able to find the person, like a magician. 'Someone told me it's your birthday. How old are you, twenty-seven?' And she's like ninety-two." Emeril could have used a hug himself. After a ten-year run, Food Network had just killed Emeril Live, his cooking show that had debuted in 1997 with a band and a live audience. It was a genre-bending formula that quickly made Emeril a household name and his kitchen catch phrases "Bam!" and "Let's kick it up a notch!" a part of pop culture. But now, a few weeks before Christmas 2007, the cameras have been switched off in the sixth-floor studio and the last burner extinguished. The executives are trying to honor his accomplishments, but Emeril's shock is setting in, his mind wheeling between disjointed thoughts: "Why are they doing this? Budget? Ken's not here? He didn't even call me? How can this be real?" Ken Lowe, the chief executive of Scripps, the parent company of Food Network, has been a dinner guest at Emeril's home. But today Ken has not made the trip to New York from corporate headquarters in Cincinnati. The network president, Brooke Johnson, stands near Susie amid the orange cabinets and cutting boards. Brooke takes a small sip of champagne, and her calm feline eyes betray little. Susie, tall with curly chestnut hair, is having a hard time. By tradition, each on-air talent at Food Network has one executive he or she is closest to, the person they call for inside information. For Emeril it is Susie. When the head of marketing, who'd hired Susie, left three years ago, Emeril had phoned Brooke and insisted that Susie take his place. As she sees the famous chef's heavy bulldog face, she flashes back to seven years earlier, when she moved to Food Network from Nickelodeon. Back then, most viewers thought Food was the Emeril Network. His show was on every weeknight at 8 p.m. and he overshadowed all the other stars. When the network, marginally profitable in 2000, wanted to raise its profile, it didn't trot out Bobby Flay or Mario Batali. Emeril was its million-dollar man in chef's whites, the first food TV star to be signed to a seven-figure contract. It was actually only around $333,334 a year for three years, but the network wanted to impress affiliates with its financial health and commitment to its ratings star, and trumpeted it as a million-dollar deal. Susie had gone on a forty-day promotional tour with him doing dinners and cooking demonstrations-Emeril Salutes L.A., Emeril Salutes San Francisco, Boston, etc. He would rush out to a kitchen station in a ballroom or convention center and the gathered advertisers, local cable company executives, and fans who had either bought or won tickets would stand and whoop with glee. He'd give a quick talk about what he loved about the city's food, demonstrate one of his recipes, and then pose for photos with admirers. Emeril had friends everywhere. After each event, he would take Susie and his entourage to dinner. She had known his bombastic TV personality from watching him for years at home, but at the dinners, Emeril showed a sweetness and gentleness she had not imagined, his big soft hands gesturing slowly as he spoke, his Antaeus cologne radiating a warm, embracing scent. He had a sly twinkle in his eye and radiated the deep confidence of someone who knew who he was in the world. On Emeril Live, all he had to say was "let's add some more gahlic," and the audience-his audience, the people who lined up week after week to fill his bleachers-would burst into applause and cheers. Before commercial breaks, Emeril would set down his spatula, rush over to the band, and grab a pair of drumsticks, showing skills on the skins he'd learned as a musical prodigy on the high school drum team. Everything had come together and he was on top. But now, as he is toasted in the Food Network kitchens in 2007, Emeril acknowledges the good wishes as his heart grows heavier and his anger percolates. How did this day come? he asks himself. Keeping Emeril happy had been the network's priority from the moment it first saw the ratings for Emeril Live . When Brooke came to the network as head of programming in 2003, Ken Lowe told Emeril that her main focus was keeping his show at the top of its game. And from the day she started, she recognized that Emeril was king and she rarely made a decision about hiring new talent or green-lighting a series without consulting him. Brooke, a veteran TV executive who had helped the A&E network jettison its original arts programming in favor of dramatic series and crime dramas, was known for making aggressive changes that worked. She spent money on audience research to figure out the truth about what was and wasn't working and how to fix it, and then she fixed it. Gut instincts mattered, but when the gut is fed facts, its instincts tend to improve. So when she took over as president in 2004, one of her first acts was to commission a study to find out how the viewing public perceived Food Network. The outside consultants found that to many television viewers, the network delivered little besides unexciting "dump and stir" cooking shows where a chef stood behind a counter demonstrating how to make a meal. Other networks were starting to offer more exciting food programming. They presented Brooke with a graphic, the Food Network logo as a pie. It showed that Travel Channel, TLC, and the broadcast networks had bitten off portions of her market with shows shot on the road, real-life wedding tales, and other "reality" programming. The consultants titled the graphic "Nibbled to Death." The authors of the study might as well have put Emeril's face in the conclusions, a big red X marked over it. When you looked past the live band and the quick opening monologue, his two shows, Emeril Live and his lower-key half-hour weekend show, Essence of Emeril, were basic cooking shows. If Food Network wanted to grow, it was going to have to become less of the Emeril Network. But, Brooke, Susie, and other executives were not ready to let go yet. This was Emeril-surely something could be done. Brooke assigned the Emeril Live production team hundreds of thousands of dollars to update the set. They moved it to a new studio, added a Viking range, and cut out his monologue, which allowed him to head straight to the kitchen, where he was most comfortable and his energy was highest. Susie and her marketing team came up with a new overall network slogan that began appearing at commercial breaks: "Food Network: Way More Than Cooking." For three years, as the Emeril Live audience continued to age, programs such as Alton Brown's half-hour on the science of food, Good Eats ; the breakthrough competition show Iron Chef America ; and The Next Food Network Star started to thrive and attract younger viewers. Susie, like other Food Network executives, noticed the change. Then in 2007, a "Brand Lens Study" used focus groups inside and outside the network to distill the direction Food Network would have to take if it wanted to keep up with the more exciting programming emerging on other networks, especially Top Chef on Bravo. The report's conclusions found many ways to say "Get out of the studio." Brooke talked to Emeril that year, speaking with her characteristic directness. "I don't know if the show can go on," she told him in her gravelly voice. "I don't know if we can afford the show anymore. The direction of the network may be changing." "You're full of it," he'd responded in a half-joking tone. She might be engaging in some kind of negotiating ploy for when his contract came up. "C'mon, the audience is getting a little older. The show will bounce back. This show is the network still. You're not canceling it." He wasn't getting it, Brooke realized. The network was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a week on Emeril Live . Other shows typically cost $40,000 an episode, including the star's salary. So a whole thirteen-show season of a new series would cost what a week of Emeril cost. His price gave Brooke little room to make the rest of her talent roster happy. Ten years was a hell of a winning streak on television. Couldn't Emeril see that? Bobby Flay had evolved. His good-natured new competition show, Throwdown, was easily beating Emeril Live in the ratings. Just as she had challenged Emeril, she challenged Bobby to come up with something new, and he had dreamed up the concept for Throwdown himself. But Bobby was a consistent star, not the center of the network's universe. How could Emeril be expected to believe she was serious? In the last couple years, the show had booked younger musical acts and invited younger chefs to cook with him. It was a fertile gambit, but telling. A local deejay named Sunny Anderson, from New York's Hot 97 FM, demonstrated a fried chicken recipe. She was charming and pretty and African-American, a group that was not well represented in the network talent. The producers and Susie gaped at her ease on camera. Soon Sunny had her own show, Cooking for Real . Not long before the end of Emeril Live, Susie phoned Emeril's talent agent Jim Griffin, a legend who represented Regis Philbin, Joe Namath, and Geraldo Rivera. It was a last-ditch effort to keep Emeril secure in the network stable and, perhaps, save Emeril Live . Susie wanted Emeril to become a regular competitor on Iron Chef America, the competition show that pitted two chefs against each other in an hourlong cooking battle in the center of a mini-stadium. Iron Chef America had a cult following and strong ratings among the viewers advertisers craved, eighteen to forty-nine years old. Susie laid out the case to Jim. It would expose Emeril to a new generation, she told him. His original audience was getting old and he wasn't attracting a new one. Iron Chef would lend Emeril an edginess. "I don't want to lose him from prime time," she said. Jim wasn't having it. "We don't want Emeril in an aggressive situation like that," Jim told her. He wanted Emeril to stay soft and safe, retaining his authentic cuddliness. Instead of pitting him in a battle royale against established Iron Chef competitors like the tattooed Clevelander Michael Symon and the kimono-wearing, histrionic Masaharu Morimoto, Jim wanted Food Network to invite new family-friendly guests to Emeril Live . He suggested Elmo, the Muppet from Sesame Street . Emeril had appeared with Elmo in 2001 in a home video called Elmo's Magic Cookbook, which was, as the advertising noted, "an enchanting mix of whimsical songs and fun food facts" in which Emeril showed kids how to "take it up a notch" by shouting "Bam!" as they added toppings like broccoli to homemade pizza. Susie hung up, exasperated. Elmo! A few weeks before the end, Brooke brought Emeril in and told him straight up that the Emeril Live episodes he was taping were his last. The decision had been made. Ken had signed off on it. He nodded and left her office, but to those around the network, he seemed to be acting as if it wasn't going to happen, as if he believed something was going to change. Ever since high school, working 11 p.m.-to-7 a.m. shifts in a Portuguese bakery in Fall River, Massachusetts, and sleeping in the afternoons between the end of classes and the start of his shift, Emeril had had a plan-what his next step would be, which chefs he would train under, what neighborhood he wanted as a location for his first restaurant, then his second and third. But on the day of his final episode he finds himself with no plan. Over the next few weeks, he is racked by self-doubt. In addition to asking him to do Iron Chef, Brooke and Susie had tried to coax him to travel around the country for more out-of-the-kitchen segments on Emeril Live . They wanted him to connect with his audience, bring air and natural light to the show. Had he made a mistake, he asked himself, when he and Jim bucked those demands? They had protested that Emeril was a real restaurateur, not merely a TV personality like so many of the newer Food Network stars. It was crucial for his self-identity and his brand identity that he never stray too far from a working kitchen. He no longer had time to barnstorm around the country in a van with a TV crew, they argued. Emeril Live was like The Tonight Show, Jim had insisted to Brooke, a formula that was safe and working and did not need to fundamentally change. Now Emeril thinks maybe he should have listened to Brooke and fought Jim. But a few weeks after the last day of taping for Emeril Live, Brooke calls him into her office again. The network has decided to end production on his other cooking show, Essence of Emeril, which had run off and on for twelve years. This is too much. He stares at her, his eyes flaring, but he says nothing. So that's how they are playing it, he thinks. They have hundreds of Essence and Emeril Live in the can. What do they need the real Emeril for when they have those hours of old Emeril to exploit? He retreats to his restaurant in New Orleans and cooks on the line. Obviously the network is evolving, he thinks. Okay. But I don't understand why it's evolving without me being a part of it. I don't know why I'm getting the door shut on me. I've given a lot of time and a lot of my life to build the network and paved the way for a lot of people. When he is next back in New York, he sits in Susie's office. They are talking about how he might fit into the future of the network. "Maybe you should try doing something on Next Food Network Star, or maybe Iron Chef ?" Susie asks him hopefully, not letting the idea go. She hates seeing this man she idolized unable to come to terms with this change, like an aging quarterback who cannot accept he was being benched. "How about that, Iron Chef ?" Emeril had built this network, had given it fifteen years of his life. When he started on his first show in 1993, How to Boil Water, Food Network was in 6.8 million homes. Now they are in more than 90 million. He had been here long before Susie arrived. Before Brooke. Rachael Ray had been barely removed from her job as a shopgirl selling candy apples at a counter in the basement of Macy's when he'd been cooking for Leno and yelling "Bam!" on The Tonight Show, bringing in men, young women, and millions of viewers who had never dreamed they'd ever tune in to a cooking show. He helped people. He raised money for charity. All the hosts who came after him had sought out his advice on how to build their careers, how to be the best versions of themselves on camera. He'd seen their hunger, increasingly desperate in recent years as the stakes for success had risen: fame-grappling starlets who couldn't make a piecrust from scratch and men with hair gel in their knife kits, all willing to fight like subway rats for a toehold in the fickle Food Network family. Iron Chef . He is not going to kowtow to these people. He is not some novice cooking graduate grasping for a show before he'd worked a single shift in a professional kitchen. "How about Platinum Chef ?" he barks at Susie, walking out of her office, his rage, embarrassment, and fear bubbling over. "Have you thought of that?" This was not the Food Network it used to be. Excerpted from From Scratch: Inside the Food Network by Allen Salkin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Preface: Roll Over | p. ix |
Prologue: A Final Toast to Emeril Live | p. 1 |
1 Starting from Scratch | p. 9 |
2 CNN with Stoves | p. 41 |
3 "Chefs Are the New Rock Stars" | p. 70 |
4 Bobby, Sara, Mario, and the Too Hot Tamales | p. 96 |
5 BAM! | p. 131 |
6 Changing the Recipe | p. 150 |
7 New Owners Again!?! | p. 173 |
8 "Allez Cuisine!" | p. 195 |
9 You Reap What You Sow | p. 226 |
10 Comfort Food | p. 255 |
11 Noodle Roni with Blue Eyes: A New Kind of Star | p. 288 |
12 Competitors Sharpen Their Knives | p. 322 |
13 Channeling the Soul of a Chef | p. 357 |
14 A Ten-Billion-Dollar Prize | p. 383 |
Epilogue: June 2013 | p. 421 |
Acknowledgments | p. 423 |
Index | p. 427 |