The Galloping Gourmet

 By Bruce Shawkey

One of the first cooking shows on TV, and one that I got hooked on as a young man in the '70s, was "The Galloping Gourmet." It aired on PBS in the late '60s and early '70s. It was not the first cooking show. Julia Child and her show, "The French Chef," premiered in 1963, but the Galloping Gourmet was less pretentious, becoming the archetype and for many to follow, and indeed an entire network devoted to chefs and cooking.

The host and chef of the show, of course, was Graham Kerr, born in England in 1934. As I write this blog entry in 2024, Kerr is still alive, though at 90 is fully retired and living at Warm Beach Senior Community,  a faith-based, not-for-profit retirement community in Warm Beach, Washington state. It is rumored he is still healthy, witty, charming, and quite a hit among the ladies residing at the community. His first wife, Treena, died in 2015. He remarried in 2024.

My favorite part of his show was at the end, where he would sit down at a fully decked-out dining table, in fine suit and tie, and partake of what he had cooked on the show that day, usually accompanied with a glass of wine and someone from the audience, usually a female. His expressions were priceless, bordering on the orgasmic, as he would take a bite of his food.

Many tributes of his cooking show can be found on the Internet, but perhaps the best was written by celebrity chef Nigella Lawson. In a 2018 post, she writes:

"When I was a child, the Galloping Gourmet was one of the high points of my television-watching life: it wasn’t merely a program but an event. Those of my vintage and above will know exactly what I’m talking about. It was such a good-natured cookery program, flamboyant, full of bonhomie, a lot of butter and wine and it all led up to the drama of the final moments, when Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet himself, would pluck someone out of the audience (inevitably female, I seem to remember) to come up and eat the meal he’d cooked with him. I’ve never forgotten the excitement, and yet I have never remembered a thing he cooked, apart from a hazy memory of sauce pans bubbling with cream or foaming with butter."

He has had quite a turnaround in his retirement, renouncing his decadent cooking habits and eating a more healthy diet. The retirement community he lives has apartments, and he is no doubt cooking on his own, with more healthy ingredients, probably no butter or cream!