Look, I’m not saying that Pugh lacks cooking skills — because she doesn’t. The “Don’t Worry Darling” and “Midsommar” star knows her way around a kitchen (and an allium) as well as any competent hobbyist, and she previously worked in one of the several Oxford restaurants her father owns. But let’s concede that she is not a professional culinary expert capable of imparting precise and technical know-how to her viewers.
Nevertheless, Pugh’s off-the-cuff, self-filmed series is going to morph into something more formal. An official show “is definitely in the works,” the actress revealed in a recent interview. That news came just as model Hailey Bieber’s YouTube show, “What’s in My Kitchen?” launched last week. Those developments come on the heels of “Selena + Chef,” the HBO Max show in which actress Selena Gomez enlists chefs to help her learn to cook.
This latest boomlet of celebrity cooking shows might just constitute a moment in which we make peace with something that might have been troubling us: It’s time we just accept that celebrity cooking shows aren’t actually about teaching home cooks how to prepare food. Instead, they’re entertainment that we can just enjoy without having to harbor even the pretense that we’re going to emulate them. They’re peeks at the kitchens of the rich and fabulous. They’re a font of vibes. And that’s okay.
Pugh is great for kitchen inspiration. In the early days of the pandemic, she encouraged her followers to enjoy those scroungy meals we were all making in an effort to stretch out time between trips to the store.
“All those sad, bruised, upset vegetables — we’re going to put them in a pan and they’re going to be delicious!” she exhorted as she created a ratatouille-adjacent dish (which was initially going to include a decidedly nontraditional addition of carrots, though she eventually forgot to toss them in the pan).
Her go-with-the-flow energy is admirable, and her reminders to use what you have and trust your judgment are helpful to novice cooks.
Bieber has even less to pass along when it comes to actual kitchen skills. In one episode, she uses a haphazard method of breading chicken wings: dipping the poultry into the egg wash and then the flour-cornstarch coating with both hands, which results in gummed-up fingers, instead of employing the “wet-hand/dry-hand” method, which is so much simpler and cleaner. Undaunted and perhaps unaware of this widely taught approach, she playfully wiggles her gooey digits at the camera.
It’s not that she’s a bad cook — she seems comfortable and sincere when she claims that she routinely whips up these dishes — it’s just that her style is more aspirational than instructional.
Still, there’s plenty of entertainment to be found, if Hailey Bieber — whose marriage to pop star Justin Bieber is routinely the stuff of gossip — is your flavor of tea. And, hey, it’s fun to gawk at her luxe marble countertops and backsplashes.
Louie Dean Valencia, an associate professor at Texas State University who studies celebrity culture (seriously, he teaches an entire class on Harry Styles), notes that in this new chapter of celebrity cooking shows, the stars are younger, with lives that fans already expect to see glimpses of on social media. Bringing them into the kitchen is just an extension of that, he says, and allows them to shape the narrative around them — which is often defined by tabloid coverage.
“If you are able to give people a lens into your life through food, it feeds — quite literally — the desire to get to know celebrities, but in a way you can control,” Valencia says.
It’s also a shift that this new crop of food-show hosts didn’t have to wait for someone else to give them a platform. This isn’t Valerie Bertinelli, the actress whose show ran on the Food Network for 14 seasons, or country singer Trisha Yearwood, whose “Trisha’s Southern Kitchen” has been shown on the same channel for more than a decade. Stars can now dabble in the medium — see actress Jennifer Garner’s “Pretend Cooking Show” segments on Instagram.
And the fans? Well, they don’t care if the celebs they follow do everything perfectly in the kitchen. “The dishes can be good enough,” Valencia says.
The early era of food TV, where classically trained chefs treated their half-hour slots like mini-culinary school sessions for their audiences of housewives, are clearly aspic-encased relics. Their successors might have dialed up the showmanship with so many “Bams” and “Yum-os,” but the educational DNA remained evident. Now, we’re in the age of extreme competition, with chef-testants battling in grocery aisles and elaborately tiered kitchen sets.
And today’s food media galaxy is fractured into a million more planets. You can call up instructional videos for specialized tasks like carving a turkey. (I must have watched this one, from my colleague Aaron Hutcherson, a dozen times.) You can watch TikToks of highly trained chefs.
Which means that the celebrity cooking show can simply coexist with all that other content, in its own space, not needing to do anything but what it does. Which is, for this new group of hosts, whatever they want.
