Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
and Grazing with Television's Culinary Tourists
David Dunn
School of Drama and Creative Industries, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, UK
Soups delicately coloured like summer dresses,
coral, ivory, or pale green . . .
location and ingredients to authenticate and
validate gastronomic journeys. It considers two
British television series,
Rick Stein's French
Odyssey
, shown on BBC2 in 2005, and
Jamie's
Great Italian Escape
, Jamie Oliver's self-
reenergizing pilgrimage through Italy shown on
C4 also in 2005. It will suggest that both owe
much to the legacy of the food writer Elizabeth
David, whose work Mennell (1985, p. 271)
argues 'might be considered gastronomic litera-
ture as much as cookery books'.
2
The culinary
travelogue has some kinship with travel writing,
and owes at least some of its signifying practices
to the ways in which she, and the gastro-literary
tradition that she created, evoked the taste of
food through vivid, almost painterly, descrip-
tions of the raw and the cooked, and celebrated
food as the signifi er of a landscape and the his-
tory of its people. Both of these series refl ect
David's construction of the Mediterranean as a
prelapsarian Eden, culturally and gastronomi-
cally, and offer examples of how the television
camera focuses on location and ingredients
in situ
to authenticate and validate aspirational
journeys which both stand for the taste of things
and which fl atter by association the tastes of
(Elizabeth David)
Television travelogues have struggled with taste.
The gaze of the camera is predisposed to privi-
leging the scopic of tourism; and however sig-
nifi cant the other senses have become for an
understanding of the diversity of contemporary
touristic practice, and whatever the importance
of food for many tourists, the taste of food is, in
the main, mediated on the television screen by
words. As holiday programmes have waned,
new lifestyle strands address the aspirations of
viewers, refl ecting in the process the growing
convergence between mobility, leisure and tour-
ism. Not least amongst these are cookery pro-
grammes, with the television chef, liberated
from the domestic space of his or her kitchen,
able to make cooks' tours of varying purpose;
cookery demonstrations
in situ
, narratives of
food heritage, searches for 'authentic' local
ingredients, personal quests by celebrity chefs.
1
This chapter is about the culinary travel-
ogue, about the ways in which television can
evoke fl avour, and deploy visual signifi ers of
1
See Strange (1998) for a typology of cookery programmes; Cookery-Educative, Personality, Tour-Educative,
Raw-Educative.
2
Mennell (1985) cites Jane Grigson, herself a
protégée
of David as the other infl uential fi gure. See also Jones
and Taylor (2001), for a comparative study of their quests for authenticity in the kitchen, and Floyd (2004) on
the (im)practicalities of David's culinary articulations with her readership.
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