Keith Floyd
American audiences may not be as familiar with Keith Floyd as they are with Julia Child or many of the television food personalities on today’s screens （too many, as far as I’m concerned, but who am I to talk?）， but for the Brits and for me as well, Floyd set the gold standard for the television food travelogue. In episode after episode, he conquers the recipes of entire countries as he swills glasses of wine while eruditely displaying an encyclopedic knowledge of their cuisine.
If you have never seen his show, it is now easily found on YouTube and is a real treat for any food lover. The format of the show is basic. Floyd travels to a foreign country or a region of England and cooks classic local dishes in kitchens borrowed from farmers, landed gentry, housewives, fishermen, and chefs. He also often cooks “en plein air.” In one episode of Floyd on Spain, he cooks a pork stew in the Spanish countryside. In an episode of Floyd on Italy, he makes a local pasta dish in the piazza of a small Italian town, and in another, a fish stew aboard a fishing boat in rough waters. When filming in a public place, the handheld camera candidly catches the locals as they look on bewildered, amused, and even annoyed as this mad Brit in a bow tie and suspenders conjures up their traditional dishes with a booze-fueled fervor while prattling away nonstop to the camera.
I recently watched an episode that took place in a small home kitchen that he had commandeered in Provence. The sequence begins with a continuous six-minute take, something you would never see on a cooking show today. Floyd starts out with a sip of wine as he shows us a sink full of fish he has bought at a local market for a Proven?al fish stew he’s about to make. He directs the camera operator to get a shot of this and a shot of that as he describes the types of fish, then directs the fellow to follow him, colander of fish in hand, as he moves over to the stove, explains the base for the stew, dumps the fish in a pot, adds some hot water, then swiftly moves over to the oven, takes out a chicken that is roasting, explains the manner in which he has prepared it but tells us how the matron of the house told him he had done it improperly, and then says he doesn’t really care what she thinks and he doesn’t really know everything about French cooking anyway as he deftly makes his way back to the stove where in four separate pans simmer the ingredients of a ratatouille, explains each one individually, then combines them and wraps up the sequence with a sip of wine and a comment about needing a break. He does all this for six minutes straight without a pause. If you have ever tried to film yourself, or have someone film you, preparing even the simplest recipe while talking to a camera, you will know that it is close to impossible to do it without having to cut and reset countless times. It is most likely that you will make mistakes again and again and will eventually have to edit the bits and pieces together later on. To sustain a take for six minutes and keep it interesting and entertaining is a feat I challenge any of today’s television chefs to attempt. Is the production quality of Floyd’s show the greatest? Hardly. But his energy, excitement, and profound knowledge about what he’s doing, along with some impressive handheld camerawork, makes for an incredibly dynamic and entertaining cooking show.
In one episode he is hunkered down with the Royal Navy somewhere in Cornwall and cooks Portuguese man-of-war （a dish I had never heard of that combines pork, onions, tomatoes, and a variety of mollusks） in rectangular pans over a makeshift stove of mud and bricks on a characteristically miserable gray English afternoon, while slurping rum from a teacup. The whole sequence, which is composed of only a few shots, happens very quickly and is as wonderfully entertaining as it is bizarre. Do we know how the dish tastes? No, we don’t. But does it really matter? Not to me.
Floyd made us feel like any one of us could make any of the dishes he made even with the most rudimentary kitchen kit, the most primitive fire source, in the worst weather, in the middle of fucking nowhere, while swilling just about anything alcoholic from a tin can. Besides being entertaining, whether he was roughing it or cooking in the kitchen of a Michelin-starred restaurant, Floyd was incredibly informative, and you walked away from each show feeling that you had actually learned something about the history and culture that were the root of the dishes he prepared with such assurance. He did this without being precious or pedantic, spitting out the information quickly as he chopped, stirred, sautéed, basted, and of course, in his words, “slurped.”
He died at the age of sixty-five of a heart attack. Too many years of smoking and excessive drinking took their toll on an autodidactic cook who taught real chefs more than a thing or two and gave great pleasure to many food lovers all over the globe. What Keith Floyd did by taking the cooking show out of the studio into the streets, onto the seas, and up to the mountaintops changed the face of food television for better and forever. Those of us in that world should take a lesson from his irreverent improvisatory style and follow in his peripatetic footsteps.