Cooking for the Camera

"It's best to cook a strudel when you feel mean," said Dione Lucas last week as she demonstrated how to do it over Manhattan's WPIX. "The beast stands or falls on how hard you beat it. If you beat the dough 99 times, you will have a fair strudel. If you beat it 100 times, you will have a good strudel. But if you beat it 101 times, you will have a superb strudel." Dione Lucas ought to know. Born in Italy, raised in France, she is a handsome, 46-year-old Englishwoman whose lifelong love affair with the fine art of cooking be gan at 16 in the kitchen of one of the best restaurants in Paris. Today she is easily the best and most authentic thing of her kind on TV, is seen on film in about 60 U.S. cities and "live" in the New York area.

It is a measure of how TV cooking has declined that Dione Lucas does not have a horde of imitators. Gone are the old days when TV cooking simmered along on full-length programs over most stations around the country and the meringue melted under hot lights.

Ham Sandwich. Today the lights are not so hot, but neither is the outlook for TV cooks. Last week Boston, hub of New England cookery, could boast only two half-hour cooking spots a week. Chicago had only two TV cooks. San Francisco, whose cooking ranks with the best in the U.S., had none. The trend was the same in other parts of the country.

The trouble seems to be that the TV brass just does not believe that housewives are interested in good cooking. Where TV cooking has survived, it generally aims at a mass audience that will buy sponsored gastronomic monstrosities (e.g., prewhipped cream).

Many showmen seem a little ashamed of the cooking part of the show, and often sandwich it like an old piece of dry ham between a slice of news and a slice of music, both considered more substantial and more palatable.

Song to a Lamb. One NBC official admits that TV Chef Mike Roy (KRCA-TV in Los Angeles) owes his success to the fact that he is not a professional cook, but an actor who can ad lib and keep guest cooks laughing. Another NBC cook, this one a past master, felt obligated on one Home show from New York to fight a duel with skewers of shish kebab while singing I Love Ewe.

But Chef Dione Lucas remains a purist. She calmly refuses the customary TV gimmicks, chats informally with a sprinkling of wit and common sense as she displays her skill with a skillet. Last week she demonstrated paupiettes de veau Fontage and the unexpurgated chicken marengo (two small chickens are browned in sweet butter; a hen lobster is sauteed, then shelled; chickens and lobster are flamed in cognac, sprinkled with an aromatic sauce of tomatoes, mushrooms, shallots, tarragon and dry vermouth, garnished with fried eggs on croutons and slices of truffles). Chef Lucas makes it look easy, but any housewife ought to know better.

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