On the box
By Dave Riley
The TV cooking program has known many a fashionable feast. The early fascination for dinner parties soon gave way to quick meals and the exotics, and thereafter to the National Heart Foundation.
The newest trend for TV gastronauts has been to go find their roots (for the Bush Tucker Man, this is literally true). Recipe-based television now prefers to fossick for local cuisine by eating its way through a region. A Cajun gumbo or a Catalonian paella is as close as your console. Eat in tonight and, while digesting, watch someone else cook up a storm in a distant land with a few prawns and a handful of okra.
The Rich Tradition (SBS, Fridays) is as far from food fancy as you can get. This is peasant fare brought to the table with the sweat of a subsistence brow. The little farmhouses peopled by stock Slavs, Latins and Celts supply simple stodgy meals meant to get you through a day's hard labour. This is food for the belly, not for the mind.
The program is the work of Elisabeth Luard, a specialist in European regional peasant cooking. As presenter she has a deft touch with the cultural and culinary diversity which centuries of European history have imposed on many a farmscape. Generations have struggled to pass on the plow and cooking pot to bear through another winter, a new war or further pestilence. Peasants all, not a hippie amongst them, and dedicated to one thing: the stomach.
This series is a refreshing break from the fascinations of its forebears. Instead of just a tour around the menu, Luard's European journey is a reminder that the matter and motion of history are the lives and lifestyles of myriads of humans. The baseline is survival; as Brecht wrote, "First the belly, then morality".
Perhaps this is all a bit coarse for would-be chefs perched over a Bamix and the latest from Margaret Fulton, but Luard's homage to peasantry reaffirms the substance of such basic preoccupations.