ABSTRACT
While Dutch society, media, and cultural life in the 1950s and 1960s was still “pillarised” according to religious or political alignments, cooking programmes on public television were able to circumvent this fundamental segregation and promote a “national” cuisine integrating more and more international influences and ingredients. The first programmes covering food, health, and cooking in the 1950s, were hosted by well-known presenters of radio shows or cooks already known as the chefs of popular restaurants. However, from the 1960s on, Dutch cooking programmes and their hosts started redefining the Dutch menu and linked cooking more to aspirant lifestyles than to national traditions. This article analyses cooking programmes on Dutch television of the 1950s and 1960s as transmedia productions avant la lettre that helped redefine the Dutch menu. It traces this transformation through a variety of sources, such as TV chefs’ cookbooks, newspaper reviews, announcements in TV guides and the few “remainders” of the actual programmes surviving in the Dutch television archive (The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Hilversum).
