Formality and informality in cooking shows

Paula Deen and the development of a genre

Susanne Mühleisen | University of Bayreuth

Televised cooking shows have emerged as a genre with an established format in the entertainment industry. This chapter will look at cooking shows as a communicative event with a predictable sequence of acts and a set overt (instruction) and covert (entertainment) goal. This highly focussed and potentially formal communicative event (Irvine 1979) typically relies on strategies of informality, that by now have become a convention of the genre, in order to distract from its directive ‘lesson’ character. In a comparison of several cooking shows by US Southern celebrity chef Paula Deen, I will pay attention to changes in conventions of formality and informality which can be observed over time. Particular emphasis will also be placed on the linguistic features which are indexical to Paula Deen’s US Southern persona.

Published online: 18 June 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.47.10muh

References

Buscemi, F.

2014 Television as a trattoria: Constructing the woman in the kitchen on Italian food shows. European Journal of Communication 29(3): 304–318.

Chan, A.

2003 La grande bouffe: Cooking shows as pornography. Gastronomica 3(4): 46–53.

Chiaro, D.

2013 Passionate about food. Jamie and Nigella and the performance of food-talk. In Culinary Linguistics: The Chef’s Special [Culture and Language Use: Studies in Anthropological Linguistics 10], C. Gerhardt, M. Frobenius & S. Ley (eds), 83–102. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Collins, K.

2010 Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Dayter, D.

2018 Self-praise online and offline. The hallmark speech act of social media? Internet Pragmatics 1(1): 184–203.

Deen, P.

2011 Paula Deen’s Southern Cooking Bible. New York NY: Simon and Schuster.

Ferdman, R. A.

2015 The problem with watching too many cooking shows. The Washington Post, Wonkblog 18 March 2015 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?destination=%2fnews%2fwonk%2fwp%2f2015%2f03%2f18%2fthe-unfortunate-side-effect-of-watching-too-many-cooking-shows%2f%3f (19 March 2019).

Goffman, E.

1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York NY: Anchor Books, Doubleday.

Irvine, J.

1979[2001] Formality and informality in communicative events. American Anthropologist 81(4): 773–790. Reprinted in Duranti, A. (ed.). 2001. Linguistic Anthropology. A Reader, 189–207. Oxford: Blackwell.

Labov, W. & Waletzky, J.

1967 Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts [American Ethnological Society], J. Helm (ed.), 12–44. Seattle WA: University of Washington Press.

Matwick, K. & Matwick, K.

2014 Storytelling and synthetic personalization in television cooking shows. Journal of Pragmatics 71: 151–159.

Mills, E.

2016 We spend more time watching food on TV than we do cooking it. The Telegraph 22 September 2016 <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/news/we-spend-more-time-watching-food-on-tv-than-we-do-cooking-it/ (19 March 2019).

Pope, L., Latimer, L. & Wansink, B.

2015 Viewers vs doers. The relationship between watching food television and BMI. Appetite 90: 131–135.

Rosemary

2015 Philip Harben – TV’s first celebrity chef. Rosemary and Pork Belly 15 May 2015 <https://rosemaryandporkbelly.co.uk/philip-harben-chef/ (19 March 2019).

Tominc, A.

2015 Cooking on Slovene national television during socialism: An overview of cooking programmes from 1960 to 1990. DRUŽBOSLOVNE RAZPRAVE 79: 27–44.

Shulman, D.

2016 The Presentation of Self in Contemporary Social Life. Los Angeles CA: Sage.

Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Mühleisen, Susanne

2021. Brutal spoons and cheesy gloves. Internet Pragmatics

Rüdiger, Sofia

2021. Intimate consumptions. Internet Pragmatics

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 10 may 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.