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The French Chef (1963)
8.8/10on IMDb
First aired
Boeuf Bourguignon, from the first season of The French Chef (1963)
Julia Child walked viewers through a classic French stew in black and white on Boston's public station WGBH. What still teaches is her refusal to hide anything: when a dish misbehaved she kept going and showed how to rescue it, turning mishaps into lessons that calmed nervous cooks. Child received a Peabody Award in 1964, and her unhurried, step-by-step pace remains easy to cook along with today. PBS has posted the first season on its YouTube channel, and the series also streams on pbs.org.
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The Galloping Gourmet (1968)
8.5/10on IMDb
First aired
The opening and closing of any episode, taped in Ottawa, 1968 to 1972
Graham Kerr runs onto the set and leaps over a dining chair, a stunt his wife and producer Treena Kerr dreamed up, then cooks in front of a live audience at CJOH-TV. The famous sip of wine was mostly a cue for the director to cut to commercials; he called it a "short slurp" and drank very little. At the end he brings an audience member up to share the dish. Watch it for the lesson that cooking for guests should feel like a party, not an exam. There is no official streaming release, but reruns have aired in the US on Food Network and Cooking Channel.
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Fanny Cradock Cooks for Christmas (1975)
First aired
The BBC's 1975 Christmas series
Of the several series Fanny Cradock made, this is the only one known to survive in the television archives, and it has been repeated in recent years on BBC Four, Good Food and Food Network UK, usually around Christmas. She takes viewers through a whole festive meal, from mincemeat and the cake to the turkey, pudding and petits fours, and the lesson worth taking is her planning: the jobs are spread out so that Christmas Day itself is manageable. The ball gowns, piping bag and vegetable dyes date it, but the timetable is as useful as ever.
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Yan Can Cook
8.4/10on IMDb
A stir-fry demonstration from Yan Can Cook, KQED, from 1982
Martin Yan learned his television craft in Canada, where his earlier show Yan Can ran to 250 daily editions from CFAC in Calgary, before moving to San Francisco's public station and renaming it. His cleaver work and stir-frying are fast, funny and genuinely instructive: watch how everything is cut before the wok goes on the heat. The show has passed 3,500 episodes, his sign-off, "If Yan can cook, so can you!", is a fair promise, and classic episodes stream on pbs.org and the PBS app.
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Madhur Jaffrey
Born
Shrimp and rice with fresh Indian spices, her guest episode of In Julia's Kitchen with Master Chefs, PBS, 1995
Already a celebrated actress, with a Berlin Silver Bear for Shakespeare Wallah, and the author of An Invitation to Indian Cooking (1973), Jaffrey fronted Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cookery for the BBC in 1982, the first mainstream British series about Indian food and the first presented by an Indian. That series is hard to find today, but this later visit to Julia Child's kitchen streams on PBS stations. She cooks a southern Indian shrimp dish in a spicy coconut sauce with basmati rice and shows how to turn the intensity of the spices up or down, a useful lesson for anyone new to Indian cooking.
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Peter Russell-Clarke
Born
Come and Get It, ABC Australia, 1983 to 1992
Peter Russell-Clarke packed each episode of this healthy-eating program into five minutes, sometimes visiting the farms and factories where food is produced or explaining its history before finishing with a quick dish at the stove. The ABC made around 900 of them, and the format is the lesson: one ingredient, one idea and one recipe, short enough to watch before starting dinner. The series has no official streaming release, but Australia's National Film and Sound Archive shows a 1981 news clip of him cooking dim sum, made just before Come and Get It began.
More about Peter Russell-Clarke7
Ken Hom's Chinese Cookery (1984)
First aired
A wok demonstration from the 1984 BBC series
Ken Hom, born in Tucson, Arizona, and a cooking teacher in California before the BBC auditioned him, made stir-frying look like something any British kitchen could manage. He even developed a flat-bottomed wok in the 1980s because round ones did not suit British stoves, and the companion book went on to sell 1.5 million copies. The clips still teach the basics clearly: a very hot pan, small batches and everything prepared before cooking begins. The BBC has brought all eight episodes back on iPlayer in its archive collections, though availability comes and goes.
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Floyd on Fish (1985)
8.4/10on IMDb
First aired
The bouillabaisse episode, BBC, 1985
Keith Floyd visits the fish market at Newlyn in Cornwall and cooks far from any studio, glass of wine in hand, chatting to his crew as if the cameras were an afterthought. That style made him a pioneer of taking cooking programs out of the studio, and Antony Worrall Thompson said that all modern TV chefs owe him a living. Beneath the banter is a solid lesson: start with the freshest fish you can find, and cook it simply. Floyd on Fish, his first series, is missing from the Keith Floyd DVD collection, so repeats are the main way to catch it.
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Justin Wilson's Louisiana Cookin'
8.7/10on IMDb
A Cajun dish from Louisiana Cookin', Louisiana Public Broadcasting, 1980s
Justin Wilson made his programs for Louisiana's public network, and PBS carried Louisiana Cookin' nationwide, bringing Cajun home cooking to viewers far from the bayou. His easygoing manner and his promise of results, the catchphrase "I gar-on-tee!", make even an unfamiliar dish feel within reach. Watch for the way he builds flavor in a single pot, a habit that suits weeknight stews as well as jambalaya. The series has no official streaming release; the American Archive of Public Broadcasting holds episodes from it.
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Jacques Pépin
Today's Gourmet, filmed at KQED in San Francisco, from 1991
Jacques Pépin had cooked for Charles de Gaulle and written La Technique, still used as a textbook for the fundamentals of French cooking, before he became a familiar face on public television. For this list, his hands are the reason to watch: he bones, chops and shapes with real economy, and he narrates each movement plainly enough to copy. Almost any episode makes a good short lesson in knife skills and kitchen efficiency, and the Jacques Pépin Foundation streams full episodes of the series, courtesy of KQED.
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Two Fat Ladies (1996)
8.5/10on IMDb
First aired
The first series, BBC Two, from October 9, 1996
Jennifer Paterson rides up on a Triumph Thunderbird with Clarissa Dickson Wright in the sidecar, and the two "cooks not chefs" then cheerfully ignore every fashionable rule of the decade, reaching for lard, clotted cream and fatty cuts. Underneath the eccentricity is a real lesson in traditional British and country cooking. The program ran to 24 episodes over four series, the last cut short by Paterson's death, and all 24 are on a four-disc DVD set.
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Delia Smith
All About Eggs, the first episode of Delia's How to Cook, BBC Two, October 13, 1998
Delia Smith spent a whole program on boiling, poaching and scrambling eggs before moving on to dishes such as an egg and lentil curry. It sounds too basic for television until you watch it, and viewers clearly agreed: the series has been credited with a 10% rise in egg sales in Britain. It shows her gift for teaching basics directly, and anyone who has ever turned out a rubbery poached egg will learn something from it. The BBC released the series on home video, and secondhand copies are the realistic way to see it now.
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