Child helped pave the way for the popular syndicated program The Galloping Gourmet, which ran from 1968 to 1971. The program’s host was chef and nutritionist Graham Kerr, who has since created several other food-related programs for public television and cable. Similarly, Jeff Smith’s The Frugal Gourmet began at a small public television station and eventually reached national prominence. Dozens of local, regional, and national programs have followed suit, often focusing on particular ethnic or regional cuisines and/or on the challenges of preparing home-cooked food quickly and inexpensively.

The number and range of food-related programs in the United States exploded with the creation of the Food Network cable channel in 1993. Initially, the channel targeted principally middle-class working mothers and “foodies”—serious cooks and restaurant fans. For its first two seasons, the network developed a small but dedicated audience through a mix of original programming and reruns of older favorites (including The Galloping Gourmet and Julia Child’s various PBS shows). By 1996, the network began to air a number of series that challenged the pedantic conventions of traditional cooking shows, which nearly always featured a chef guiding viewers through a particular recipe or meal on a set equipped as a kitchen. Two Fat Ladies followed the exploits of a pair of happily indulgent motorcycle-riding middle-aged English women, while Ready-Set-Cook offered a game-show-like cooking competition hybrid, and Alton Brown’s Good Eats enthusiastically explained the science behind particular techniques. Among the network’s most remarkable departures from PBS-derived educational conventions is Iron Chef, a dubbed Japanese-cooking-competition program. Created in 1993 by Tokyo’s Fuji-TV, Iron Chef pits chefs from around the world against one of the program’s eponymous experts. In a 60-minute duel set in the torch-lit Kitchen Stadium, they each prepare a multicourse meal around a mystery theme ingredient. Borrowing equally from the stylistic conventions of video games, professional wrestling, Japanese game shows, and traditional cooking programs, the show abandons cooking shows’ generic formula of instructive daytime lessons for women, instead embracing hyper-masculine competition, intertextuality, and camp.

Cooking shows more typically navigate a path between discourses of expertise and certified technique and those of familial comfort. In a way that often mirrors other talk programs’ use of experts, this tension takes an explicit gendered form of address, as the shows’ hosts move between an often overtly masculine world of chefs and cooking schools and the implicitly feminized space of the domestic kitchen. This split was manifest in the very earliest programs on the air. NBC’s 1949 TV adaptation of the radio program The Mystery Chef, for example, encouraged women to take a break from their daytime soaps to develop sophisticated but manageable meals, entreating them to “always be an artist at the stove, not just someone who cooks.” The presumptive audience for many of these shows was middle-class women who didn’t work outside the home, a mode of address succinctly lampooned by “The Happy Homemaker”—the fictional program produced on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, in which Betty White reminded her viewers that “a woman who does a good job in the kitchen is sure to reap her rewards in other parts of the house.”

Extending this gendered convention is Martha Stewart, who built a synergistic media empire in the 1990s around cooking and home improvement. Her syndicated program Martha Stewart Living offers expert instruction on cooking, home decor, gardening, and crafts, all while constructing a soft-focus vision of upper-middle-class leisure and domestic femininity. As is the case with many other celebrity chefs and TV hosts, Stewart’s television program is cross-promoted with a line of magazines, websites, cookbooks, and consumer products—a marketing arrangement with the Kmart discount chain offers moderately priced linens and housewares. From Julia Child forward, though, the neat gendered logic that equates cooking on television with normative femininity has never been uncomplicated. Child herself disrupted the largely masculine culture of professional chefs, as have more recent women television chefs like Sara Moulton, who trained at the Culinary Institute of America.

In its attempts to broaden its audience, the Food Network has both exploited and slightly shifted the gendered discourses surrounding food preparation. British cookbook author and self-described “domestic goddess” Nigella Lawson’s Nigella Bites in fuses cooking with sex appeal, and Emeril Live features chef Emeril Lagasse cooking for a rapt live audience. Though he is a professionally trained restaurateur, Lagasse eschews precise recipes in favor of carefree enthusiasm. Seemingly far from the effete world of professional chefs, Lagasse adopts a working-class machismo, treating cooking as a fun hobby. Similarly, The Naked Chef follows young British chef Jamie Oliver around London as he shops for produce, relaxes with friends, and listens to the latest club music. Both shows embrace working-class masculinity as a way to deflect anxieties about the potentially feminizing act of cooking. This strategy has apparently worked; half of the audience for the network’s top-rated Emeril Live is men, and a significant portion of the network’s overall audience reportedly is not interested in cooking at all.