In the 1970s, which seem like just a few years, not four decades, ago, one of the highlights of the week was the arrival of The New Yorker.  Pauline Kael was given as much space as she wanted to review movies, and often she'd go on for pages of prose that mesmerized me.  Her reviews of such movies as "Nashville" and "Last Tango in Paris" are legendary, but I can still quote lines from dozens of her other reviews.  When she was mean, she was very, very mean (and very funny); when she was enthusiastic, she could make a movie.  Nowadays, at $7 an issue, the reviews are usually limited to two pages with a graphic taking up more space and are often written by people who aren't experts on what they're reviewing.  There are two movie reviewers: David Denby, whose opinions I usually trust, but who rarely says anything revealing, and Anthony Lane, who is much more interested in being clever than in saying anything enlightening about the films.

For the last few months, the television reviewer has been the very peculiar Emily Nussbaum.  Recently she reviewed the plethora of Food Network shows, although she admitted in the first paragraph that she didn't watch cooking shows, not an encouraging beginning.  She got the initial step right in dividing them into two kinds: competition shows ("Top Chef," "Master Chef," "Iron Chef," "Top Chef Masters," "Chopped"--the list keeps growing) and "stand and stir" shows.  She decided to watch a few episodes of "The Barefoot Contessa" from the second category and draw her conclusions from that.  I watch way too much TV these days, including many hours of the Food Network.  As a novice with a very limited sampling, Nussbaum missed almost everything there is to say about "Barefoot Contessa" and its host, Ina Garten.  Every gay man loves Garten, who seems never to have met a heterosexual male except maybe her husband who appears about once a month.  She's one of the few chefs to include her spouse or family, and when he's in an episode, they make a great show of kissing, giggling, and being affectionate.  It's not easy to watch.  But mainly she surrounds herself with the gay men of the Hamptons, who are always coming to dinner or for whom she is often delivering meals.  In return, they make flower arrangements for her table or pick up cheese for her.

Garten is unusual on the Food Network because she rarely appears on other network shows.  Otherwise, the network is almost incestuous as chefs and analysts move from show to show in an endless procession of cross-promotion.  With rare exceptions, Garten keeps her own company.  There is much less product placement than in other network shows, which are shameless about zooming in on the names of produces and appliances they're using.    Despite the title of her show, she's Jewish, not Italian, and about once a season, she'll do a traditional Jewish meal.  (Like all the Jewish chefs and commentators on the network, she embraces pork.)  Her characteristic line, which she uses many times in each episode, is "How easy/delicious/beautiful is that?"  When she has guests, which is often, she giggles a lot, one of those laughs that sounds charming the first few times, and then quickly becomes irritating.

She has tics as a chef: she uses a food processor much more frequently than other Food Network chefs who are now using Vitamix (we focus on the logo many times) blenders almost exclusively .  She measures almost everything; if she's going to add a teaspoon of salt, she actually takes out a teaspoon and measures it (before measuring the half teaspoon of pepper that's always the next ingredient).  She's the only chef who adds oil to pasta water; she thinks the oil keeps the pasta from clumping, while everyone else thinks adding oil prevents the sauce from sticking to the pasta.

I don't remember what Nussbaum said about cooking shows in general or Ina Garten in particular, but that seems to be my common reaction these days to New Yorker critics.  I still read the issues from cover to cover, and I still admire the political coverage, but by the time I get to the reviews that conclude each issue, my enthusiasm is flagging, and I'm wondering who's standing, who's stirring, and what's cooking on TV.