The Reach of a Chef

by Michael Ruhlman

  “We’ll come back,” she says, “and Rachael will be messing with the ground beef, then she’ll go to the pantry”—typically Ray acts out what Emily describes as she’s saying it, taking big, slow, exaggerated steps to the pantry, to the fridge, repeating the ingredients aloud—“get the chili and ground cumin…”

  Ray says, “Spice up the meat….”

  Emily continues, “Go back to the fridge…”

  Meanwhile, Dissin is looking at the ground beef, which is only half-cooked. He wants all the pink out of it when they start the third act, he says, so Andrea turns up the heat.

  When Emily and Rachael have moved through all the steps of the act, every action and every ingredient, Dissin and Schear return to the control room, and Dissin runs through “traffic” with the guys up there—where all the music, graphics, and video are originating from, alerting the various technicians. During the show he’ll watch each moment carefully, directing when the graphics should appear and staying in touch with Ray—Stir the pasta, he’ll instruct her as she’s about to go to break, or, Don’t forget the nutmeg. And a moment later, on cue, Ray dips down to retrieve the spices—Whoops, almost forgot the nutmeg and cinnamon for the baked apples, but I can add them now and they’ll melt down with the sugar. Perfectly seamless, efficient. Once when she tasted a soup that was so hot Dissin could hear her tongue sizzle, Ray heard his sympathetic “Ooooh” in her ear. She smiles through it all—cut hand, burned tongue—she almost never stops.

  Emily and Rachael continue talking as Dissin and Schear get ready in the control room. There seems to be some concern with the fact that this meal is so easy, she has a lot of time to talk. “No one can suck wind like me,” she says. “Chatty Cathy comes to town. Oh! I can explain how this can be vegetarian, that’s good!”

  “Didn’t you say this was a good college kids’ meal?” Emily asks.

  “No, good dorm-room meal. You can use both your pots.” Sometimes Ray will speak as if answering an invisible questioner—but it’s actually Dissin in the control room talking into her earpiece and watching her on a screen. “Emily, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to taste the meat for seasoning!”

  “You’re the smartest person in this room,” Emily deadpans.

  By the end of this act, which in the control room is an intense flurry of Schear’s “ready camera two…camera two, ready camera one…camera one,” Ray is already chopping the cilantro.

  “I’m sorry I started chopping the cilantro,” she says to the approaching Emily. “There was truly nothing else to do.”

  In fact, she’s completely finished, she did her whole meal in three acts instead of four—what will they do with the fourth? They stand around the island talking. Andrea, the chef here, suggests a mango sorbet. But Ray says, “Oh, my mom used to make Mexican ice cream sundaes—coffee ice cream, chocolate sauce, and Mexican salted peanuts. We’ve got all that.” Mark and Emily confer and there’s their dessert. “My mom will be so happy,” Ray says. “We could put whipped cream and a little cinnamon. That will be awesome.”

  Dissin and Schear head back to the control room while the new ingredients and serving dish are brought onto the set. Andrea checks the progress of the meatza, finishing in the oven. Ray sees it, “Mmm, doesn’t that look good!” and picks a tomato chunk from the top to taste.

  She goes back to the island, observes the sundae dish, looks into the air, and says, “Mark, this is going to be friggin’ gorgeous.”

  They open on the fourth act cold, meaning there’s no graphic opener, just a brief snippet of her music. She gets her cue, moves through the very short act, little more than two minutes, serving up and reviewing the meal, concluding with “I got a minute left, so let me show you a quick dessert.” She serves and presents the Mexican sundae in less than sixty seconds, then concludes with “This is quicker than calling the pizza man!” and her signature sign off: “Remember, a great meal is never more than thirty minutes away.”

  The entire show has been filmed in one hour, an especially quick one. While Andrea and her assistants clean up and wipe down, Dissin discusses the show in the control room, instructs any editing fixes to be done in a nearby room, and the finished show is on tape and ready to air before they begin the next show.

  It’s true—Ray really can do these meals in thirty minutes. When she first started demonstrating them in grocery stores, people would actually bring a stopwatch. For the show, the biggest food hurdle is the fact that they have to slow the cooking down. During another show, after the second act, having begun to sauté her nut-crusted chicken breasts, she’d had to say to Andrea, “Drea, I totally scorched these nuts, I’m sorry. I turned it up really high to get the Hollywood sizzle and I burned the nuts.” Andrea nods and takes the burned ones away and heads to the spacious network kitchen to cook some more. This, too, is relatively rare. Virtually all the dishes on the show appear pretty much as Ray cooks them in her suburban-deco kitchen set. The chicken breasts are just a little bit burned, not inedible, but she wants to present food that’s friendly, “not something that’s going to make them cry,” she says.

  “But you got the Hollywood sizzle,” Emily says, taking a seat at the island to block out the third act.

  “See, that’s what’s hard about this, we had to stop the cooking,” Ray tells me. “Other shows they have to swap out. We have to slow things down. These really are thirty-minute meals.”

  On other occasions the group around the yellow peanut island discusses various talking points—how to describe the flavor of dill, for instance, or how to deal with the anchovies she puts in her osso buco soup, which much of her core audience may be afraid of. (During discussion she says: “You can leave the anchovies out, but you’d be a dumb ass to do that.” On the show she says, “You can omit the anchovies if you don’t groove on anchovies.”) And Dissin will wonder about how the soup, which uses veal meatballs, will look cooking. “Won’t the meat-balls release scum?” he asks. “No, they don’t,” Ray responds. “I’ve made this a lot. John loves this soup.” John Cusimano, then her fiancé; they married the following fall.

  And this is all there is to it—the biggest hit on the Food Network. Osso Buco Soup, a Meatza with Corn Bread–Mix Crust, a Mexican Sundae—the foundation of a dynasty in the making—shows, books, licensing deals, magazines.

  Just as, in Flay’s words, Emeril “didn’t just happen,” neither did Ray. She grew up on Cape Cod, where her family owned a restaurant. In the late 1970s, the gas crisis cut into business enough for the family to move to upstate New York, and her mom, first-generation American-born of Sicilian parents, separated from her husband. Her mom from then on worked in restaurants, as did Ray. Ray makes a big point of the fact that she’s not a chef—which is true, but she has cooked in restaurants, in addition to washing dishes, waiting tables, and tending bar.

  She worked for a short time in food retail in Manhattan but ultimately returned upstate, where she got a job as a food buyer for a gourmet market in Albany called Cowan & Lobel. As this was the state capital, many of the customers were state employees and working several jobs, she says. But they weren’t buying the specialty ingredients she was purchasing for the store. So she ventured into the aisles to talk to the customers to find out why they weren’t buying her food. “They said they never learned to cook and they had no time,” she discovered.

  When Christmastime rolled around, Ray, clearly a savvy marketer, like Lagasse, came up with an idea to sell cooking classes. People were interested in learning to cook, and she needed them to learn how to use the food so they’d buy it. She sold four classes and called them “30-Minute Mediterranean Meals,” because people were buying Italian products. Next, she went around to local chefs and asked them to teach these classes. They wanted to charge her so much money that she wouldn’t even break even, so she said, “Screw it, I’ll just teach it myself.” The first classes were three hours long. She taught six base recipes and gave five variations on each. “So you got one recipe pa
ck,” Ray says, “and we made six things in class, so you’d know how to make thirty different things. So then you really had no excuse not to be cooking.”

  The classes became so popular that she had to start offering more. There were twenty-five to a class. Everyone would bring an apron and a sharp knife, and she’d start with the basics—how to hold that knife. Football teams, Girl Scout troops, seniors—all signed up. When a local television station wanted to do a story on Cowan & Lobel’s bestselling item, the manager said, “The cooking classes.” So that’s what was featured. The news director loved the segment and asked Ray to do a weekly thirty-minute-meals piece for him.

  Ray told him, “I think I gotta pass on that one. I’m not really a TV kind of person.” The director said, “Oh no, trust me. You are.”

  They began airing every Thursday night and soon became more popular than the weather segment. The audience began to write to Ray, complaining that they couldn’t keep track of all the recipes—would she please publish them in a book. She thought that was a good idea, took her stack of notes and recipes and computer printouts to a small publisher whose name she got from her dad, who’d been in publishing, and “begged myself into her office.”

  After three hours with the small, skeptical publisher, Hiroko Kiiffner, at Lake Isle Press, she left with a book deal.

  Ray knew she could sell the books at her classes, and she did demos at a local grocery-store chain. They agreed to let her hawk her books in-store. “We sold three thousand books in four days, and ten thousand books before Christmas,” Ray explained.

  Those numbers would be low but not unrespectable for any cookbook by a relative unknown over the course of a year, but to sell like that, in only a local market, and do so so quickly, is significant. So was the royalty check: $17,000. “I thought it was like all the money in the free world,” Ray recalls. “My mother and I, we didn’t even cash it right away, we just stared at it.” She made seventy grand off that book that first year, 1999, and she thought to herself, Shit, man, this is something.

  Meanwhile, she continued to teach her classes and tape her local news segments. A new news director at the station loved her show and asked what else she could do. “Well,” she said, “I’m poor and I eat well. And I happen to travel really well, too.” She offered a travel segment in which she’d do any kind of recreation or vacation if it was within one hundred miles and cost less than one hundred dollars. She was now beginning to understand how TV worked, how to write for it, how to edit tapes and use the equipment.

  She did another book, Comfort Foods, continued giving her classes, teaching at grocery stores, and doing her news segments (they’d finally started paying her: a hundred bucks a segment). When the Today show called, she thought it was joke, a prank by friends in the city. She called the number; an NBC receptionist answered and Ray slammed the phone down. Al Roker, she would soon learn, had gotten a copy of her book and wanted her on the show.

  At about the same time, a friend of hers, Joe Donahue, who hosted a call-in talk show called Vox Pop on public radio, contacted her, explaining that he’d had a cancellation and begging her to come on the show to do a thirty-minute meal. Ray said, “It’s radio, dude.” He said, “We’ll talk about what you’re doing, just bring a hot plate and make me lunch, please.”

  She agreed. That day, a man named Lou Ekus, a chef media trainer, was lecturing at the CIA in the Hudson Valley and heard the WAMC program. Ekus called his friend Bob Tuschman, a producer at the Food Network. Tuschman called Ray’s publisher. Kiiffner was delighted to be able to say to Tuschman, according to Ray, “If you want to see what she looks like on TV, she’ll be on the Today show on Monday.” He watched the segment and invited her up for a meeting with network executives.

  Ray recalls, “The first thing I said when I went to that meeting was ‘I don’t belong here. I’m not a chef, I can’t wear a chef coat, I won’t tell people I’m a chef, I don’t know how to do fancy stuff. I don’t belong here.’”

  They said, she recalls, “‘Let us be the judge. We don’t care that you’re not a chef, that’s kind of what we like.’

  “I left that meeting with two television shows,” Ray says. They were simply half-hour versions of what she’d already been doing for a couple years now, her thirty-minute-meal segments and her travel segment, which would become the $40 a Day show. (She’s never watched her Today show segment—she thinks she’d throw up from residual nerves.)

  “I’m a very lucky girl,” she says, sitting in her dressing room during lunch. She’d agreed to chat, rather than do her usual lunchtime thing—pedicures, shopping, “girl stuff,” she explains. “The fact that you can get paid to chat and make food amazes me.” Of her success and the speed of it (the first show aired in 2001), she says, “It’s mind-boggling to me.

  “I can’t believe the Food Network was brave enough to do it,” she continues. “Because I clearly don’t know what I’m doing half the time. I cook the way real people cook. I make mistakes, my things don’t look as pretty as fancy chefs’, and I’m out there in street clothes…. They let me do my own thing—they didn’t try to gussy me up, and I think that’s what people responded to. Not necessarily me, but the fact that they could see themselves in the show. There was nothing there to distance them.

  “You watch a show done by someone in a chef coat, you have a different perspective,” she says. She used to watch Julia Child and Graham Kerr as a kid. “When I think about it now it’s like, ‘That’s why, it’s because they wore regular clothes.’ They’re telling funny stories. Julia would stick her finger in the pot, she’d drink wine, she’d throw in a handful of salt, not measure. Normal clothing, she wasn’t in a fancy coat. Graham Kerr—same thing, cracking jokes, making food that appealed to all your senses, and there was nothing there to put you off. I watch a lot of cooking shows. Emeril, he kind of overcomes the coat thing because he’s got such a big, wonderful personality.” (Conversely, she points to Martha Stewart: “She was always dressed in street clothes, and yet I never thought I could do anything that she did.”)

  “But a lot of times,” she continued, “I’d watch those [chef] shows and it was more like a kid looking through a candy-shop window. I just wanted to look at them because they were pretty and made pretty things. But I never thought I could do those things. I just thought, Oh that’s lovely and fancy but who has time for that crap, ya know?

  “I grew up in the hospitality industry and I consider that I’m still in it,” she continues. “We’re very customer-oriented on these shows—what makes a viewer feel good about themselves, not what makes a viewer feel good about me, or how good I can be at whatever…. We’re there to make people at home feel good about themselves.

  “People are excited to tell me about themselves, not to tell me what they think about me, and that to me means I’m doing my job correctly. I have been a waitress, a bartender, a grocery-store person. I am a hospitality person. My job is to make other people feel good, to give other people what they want and what they need. And I’m doing the exact same thing here. I’m just doing it for a lot more people.”

  “At most, I think you tend to get one or two celebrity chefs a generation at most,” says Schear, who also directs Emeril Live.

  This will be a disappointment to the legions who see their future on the tube, at least if they had the dreams of multimillion-dollar book contracts. There does seem to be plenty of room, though, for new talent as hours of food programming continue to go up (for people I should say who truly want to do television because they love to do television rather than because it’s a means to fame and riches). What is it, then, that makes Rachael so popular? While her ratings are tops at the network—which makes no bones about trying to appeal to the broadest base of consumers—her television personality is widely loathed by those in the foodie community, who see the Rachael Ray phenomenon as representing a dumbing down of food television.

  To pick a random comment from the foodie Web site eGullet.org, filled with Ra
chael and Emeril animosity: “I first thought Ms. Ray was annoying,” writes one eGulleter, “then I watched her show (‘30 Minute Meals’) a couple more times. Now I’m positive she’s annoying. Her show is like a train wreck waiting to happen. I anxiously await the day she drops her mise en place after haphazardly piling it up in her arms.”

  Those less harsh critics see Ray as an emblem of pandering to the marketplace as opposed to an example of truly excellent food television (whatever that might be)—again, this comes from the pundits’ camp, the same ones who love to deride Emeril. I have to confess that I’m in this camp to some degree. I can’t watch Ray’s shows without grinding my teeth. I feel as though she’s talking to me as if I were an especially dim-witted and clueless four-year-old—and I kind of resent that. Does she really want me to believe that she’s actually like this in real life? (In fact, she’s pretty close! Replace half the sugar with lime juice and stir.)

  But part of the strength of my reaction is that I do feel she’s talking directly to me, which of course is the source of her enormous power, whether you like her or not.

  “I totally come from a snobby food background,” says Emily, the show’s culinary producer, “and it all of a sudden dawned on me when we started to do the show, there’s just so much good from this show…. It touches people’s lives. It puts them at home so they spend more time together. There’s a sense of pride when you make a meal for people you love. And I think she has a way of doing that, of creating meals that are fun, flavors people can wrap their heads around, and really enjoy and actually make.”

  Emily notes that Ray does food everybody can use—she doesn’t use any food that you can’t find in the supermarket. “That’s really important.”