For gourmet, moderation replaces TV galloping
MOUNT VERNON, Wash. — He injected extra fat into already well-marbled roasts, with a grin and an ever-present glass of wine.
He laughed uproariously at his own jokes, and told Americans that cooking at home did not have to be particularly sophisticated or difficult (Julia Child, the only other major TV chef of his era, had pretty much staked out that turf anyway) to be wild, and wildly fun.
But always, Graham Kerr leapt.
Decades before Emeril Lagasse shouted “Bam!” in administering a pinch of cayenne or garlic, Kerr defined the television cook as a man of energy and constant motion — “The Galloping Gourmet,” as his show’s title put it.
Starting in 1969, in front of a live audience (another pioneering step, long before the Food Network arrived) Kerr lassoed America into the 1970s with the novel concept that watching someone cook was, first and foremost, entertaining.
His trademark gesture of cheerful abandon came in the first few minutes of every show, when he sprinted into the audience, armed with a glass of wine, then ran back and leapt over two diningtable chairs and onto his set without spilling a drop (thanks to plastic wrap across the top).
Today, at 82, Kerr is more measured. His leaping days are over, but he still speedwalks every morning from his house, an hour north of Seattle, where he lives with daughter Tessa and her husband.
He still cooks, too, but he will not make himself a
hamburger because he thinks that 2 ounces is plenty of meat for a meal and, he said, “you can’t make a decent 2-ounce hamburger.”
Finding that place of moderation, though, was hard. In the 1970s, Kerr lurched from indulgence to asceticism and a denunciation of excess, including his own. Only gradually and with age, he said, did he find his way to a middle ground that allows for some prepared foods, cooked with minimal fat or fuss.
There is little doubt, fans and cultural historians say, that Kerr helped define a certain corner-turning moment in America.
He wasn’t the first male chef on television: James Beard got there in 1946. The run of “The Galloping Gourmet” was also relatively brief; CBS canceled the show in 1971 after a car crash in which Kerr and his wife, Treena, were badly injured, requiring a long recovery.
But in a time of profound anxiety and change — the struggles over civil rights and the Vietnam War were raging as he sprinted onto his set — Kerr’s upbeat message resonated. Even when he flubbed some kitchen maneuver, and perhaps especially when he flubbed, he reassured his audience that it was going to be all right in the end.
“It was more than hedonism, more like just joy,” said Kathleen Collins, the author of the book “Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows.” “He didn’t seem to worry at all about either the nutritional content, or the whole gestalt of drinking in the kitchen. It was all just about creating a kind of fun atmosphere.”
As a serious cook, Kerr was on shakier ground. A former White House chef publicly disparaged him, and New York Times television critic Jack Gould wrote that Kerr mixed “the informality of the Automat with food brought over from the Four Seasons.”
Kerr grew up in the kitchen, the son of hoteliers in southern England, but he was an adult before he first made the connection between cooking and entertainment. He was working as a catering adviser to the Royal New Zealand Air Force in 1960 when he suddenly had to fill in for an officer who was to conduct a cooking demonstration. Making an omelet, he also made his audience laugh. A TV cooking show in New Zealand, and then Australia, soon followed.
In his half- hour “Galloping Gourmet” segments, taped in Canada and broadcast in the United States between weekday soap operas , the focus was on meat and a lot of it . Vegetables were mere garnish.
The pace was frenetic, and not just on the set. In a kind of travelogue that linked food and foreign cultures — a precursor to Anthony Bourdain’s globe- trotting food programs — Kerr went around the world 28 times by his count, stopping to master specific dishes that he could then teach his audience.
In 1987, his wife (who also produced his show and came up with the idea of leaping over chairs) had a heart attack and a stroke at age 53. Kerr blamed himself — and his cooking.
He had already shifted by then, he said, to a new way of thinking about food as a result of his religious awakening as a Christian in the mid- 1970s .
His zeal only intensified as Treena Kerr began her recovery. ( His wife died in September 2015.) He raged against nitrites, Alfredo sauces and supersize portions of anything, and he became, by his own admission, an extremist.
“I used to call doughnuts ‘ edible pornography,’ and I’d think I was doing the world a favor,” he said. “And I’m sorry about that, I really am. That was a bad time in my life.”