Transcript (Full episode)

Interviewer: Hello and welcome to episode nine of Culinary Milestones of Canadian Cooking. I'm your host, Bella Paganelli, and I'm here with my co-host, Shelby Collier. We are both fourth-year history majors at the University of Guelph, where this show is being recorded. Today is November 17, 2023; we are delighted to be talking with Graham Kerr, who is joining us remotely from Stanwood, Washington. Graham has been active in the culinary world since the 1950s and is known for his work in England, New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and Canada. He's written over 30 cookbooks and has been in over 1,800 TV programs. In 2018, Graham was inducted into the Taste Canada Hall of Fame for his many contributions to Canadian cuisine. Welcome, Graham, and it's an honour to meet you and have you here with us today.

Graham Kerr: I couldn't be more thrilled. That's wonderful.  

Interviewer: Yay. All right, so we'll just get into our first question here. We would like to ask why did you agree to do this interview and to be a part of this project.

Graham Kerr: There is something that goes on inside this nearly 90-year-old carcass of mine

when addressing young people about your age that turns me back a few years, and I love to do it. In other words, to talk to students, especially in the culinary world, is about the most expanding personal experience that I can have. So that's why I said yes, of course.

Interviewer: Great. Well, thank you. We're very glad to have you. Can you explain your experience as a catering advisor and your experience in the New Zealand air force?

Graham Kerr: Yes, um, when I got there, about two weeks after I got there, I went into the storeroom for the officer's mess, and I saw a 40-pound case of Brussels sprouts, um, and they were just going to send it over to the officers, and I said why are you sending them 40 pounds of Brussels sprouts. There are only about 20 men that eat there, and that's far too much. Um, he said, oh uh, you know, and he talked like that from New Zealand, so he said, “well, it's saves having to break up the box,” so he's just sending them just the whole box, you know. And I said, but really, that’s so much more than they need. “You know the problem with you ______ is you’re half-staffed.” Now, to translate that, the trouble with you English people is that you’re half-staffed, and we’ve got plenty of food here, and we can waste it if we like.  And so, I decided that we will not waste it, and I spent five years introducing a system to the Air Force where they didn't waste anything. And we saved millions of dollars every year. And we improved the quality of the cooking immensely, so much so that the Navy and the Army complained about how well we were eating. And I wrote a cookbook for the Armed Forces. And that cookbook got a gold medal from the Culinary Olympics at Frankfurt in 1963. So that's a little bit about the time that I spent in the Air Force.

Interviewer: Do you think that the availability of recipes online has changed the cookbook industry?

Graham Kerr: Yes. Oh yes, enormously so, as indeed all technology has. You know, when I started on television, which was 1960 in New Zealand, there were only 50 television sets in the country. 50. I had a 100 rating. You know, I've never met anyone with a 100 rating. They were all watching. But at that stage, that was four years before Julia Child, yeah. So, when you think about it, there was Julia and me and a couple of other guys, and that was it. There's 173 people doing regular television programs now. So, what you do is you have four channels, and now some, you have 800 channels. And so, it drops the potential that you have for an audience and spreads it out, which means your budgets are lower, and you just don't have the same kind of success ratings that you have in the old days. Yeah. I had 200 million people watching me worldwide. That's impossible to get in any way. Even if it went viral, you know, you couldn't get that. So, it's completely different now.

Interviewer: You mentioned Julia Child's cooking show. Do you think that there's a relationship between your show, the Galloping Gourmet and other televised cooking shows during the period? Such as hers?

Graham Kerr: Absolutely zero. Nobody has ever, to my knowledge, jumped over a chair at the beginning of a program. And no, no cook has ever strategically done a stand-up comedy routine, you know, at the beginning with fearful jokes that should never be told in public. But you see, Treena, as I was saying off camera with you, told me, “You are the most unutterably boring man in the entire world.” And, so I was, 26 and just started in 1960. And, um, I was mortified, and I was doing the best I could. And by the way, at that stage, I was feeling because I had a national show in New Zealand which came on at eight o'clock on a Tuesday night. It would have been between Peyton Place and the Avengers. It was a very good time slot. And by the way, the TV came on at six and went off at 10, so you get some idea. So. My problem was at 26, I didn't think that I knew enough to really stand there on television and tell people how they should cook nationally. So, everything I did, I did the research. Escoffier's Guide to Modern Cookery was my Bible at that stage. I worked on every technique and everything so that it was as perfect as I could make it. And it was boring; I was so uptight about this being right. So, she got to me and her theater friends because she did radio theatre. And they were expatriates from England and a bawdy lot, to say the least. And they came up to our house, and in the front room of our house, which we re-did into a kitchen, I would do my rehearsals. And they would watch me doing the rehearsal. And shout bawdy comments at me and tell me that I was actually quite a funny guy, so why don't you be funny? I said I can't be funny; I'm doing a serious thing. No! You've got to be funny. Television is an entertainment media. If you want to teach anybody anything, start out by entertaining them. And do you know they were right? It's silly jokes, but they would laugh because they were kind. And I would go through a commercial break, wind up in the kitchen, and there was 360 people in the audience, all of whom were having a good time and laughing. And now they could watch the food. And it seemed like the laughter spilled over into the kitchen, and I felt free enough to be able to engage them in my life in a real way. Um, nothing was ever scripted except the recipe. And I really worked hard at those recipes; they took 19 hours of my time to do one episode, and we had 195 new shows a year that we did. That's a lot of work.

Interviewer: Wow. That's really cool. So, our next question we have for you. What was it like living in the 1960s, as it was such an important time for Canada and other places in the world? And how do you think that food represented the time, that time period and changing times?

Graham Kerr: Yeah, I have given some thought to that, actually. The '60s was this: it was the love season. You know, we were putting flowers into the barrels of people's guns, and the Beatles were, you know, hitting their stride. And I think that there became an inquisitive season which spilled out after the war. See, in the war, our servicemen went overseas and experienced food in Europe, for example, or even though it was wartime, it was different. They came back and they, they then worked really hard to be able to win back a quality of life after the war. And that started to get into individual homes and get to people starting to cook for each other as little gourmet groups if you will. They would have meals at home and bring their friends in and go round in a circle. You know, a different room. And I happened to hit that at exactly the right time. So, I think that a lot of people were, they didn't necessarily make my dishes. I won't say that, but I think it got them interested in having their friends in for a meal.

Interviewer: How would you characterize Canadian cooking specifically?

Graham Kerr: Um, it, I can, whether it's still that, now I don't know. Um, now I came, I was living in Australia, and commuting to Canada, then moved to Canada, um, myself. We, like the United States, but less so, are an amalgam of different people and groups. Um, where you are, Toronto area is the second most diverse city in the world, so everything about the nation, national cuisine, pours through all those different outlets and becomes a kind of mixture. Now, I feel that that needs to be saved from itself to some extent. By understanding that we as individuals are making up the whole, as the citizenry. So, we ought to bring with us something that is very much of our nation and then release it into an amalgam which is genuinely Canadian. And the only way that we can do that, I think, is to study what comes out of the ground, or out of the air, or out of the sea, in a season. So, I have a word for that called Fabis, F-A-B-I-S, which is fresh and best in season. Um, and fresh and best in season means that I'm getting the best possible quality, all at the same time, and letting those elements come together and form something which is genuinely Canadian and regional. So, I think that in menus, we should be looking for the word Fabis alongside a dish which is as good and as fresh and as available as possible in that season. And I think that would, if we did this on a consistent basis in Canada, it would immediately introduce to the world a Canadian cuisine, which would be legitimate.

Interviewer: So again, your career is so extensive, so many years of experience. Have you ever considered opening your own restaurant or anything like that?

Graham Kerr: I did. I was that, to begin with. I had my own restaurant, and it was the forerunner of what I call Fabis because everything in the restaurant was put in a cold display cabinet so that people could see the ingredients. And then, I would talk their way through selecting the ingredients and then would have that cooked to order for each person. So, you got to put what you like together in the dishes. And that was complicated, which is what I'm like. I'm complicated. So, it would have worked, I think. But that was a time when the British Army was called back up again and was having a fight over the Suez Canal, and that did the business in.  I became the general manager of the Royal Ascot Hotel in England, and so I ran, you know, a restaurant, which was quite successful. But having done that, um, when one starts to write cookbooks and do TV shows, there is really no time for anything else, really, especially when you have to do 195 new shows a year. I did a sprinkling of my own creative stuff. But most of it, I just had to go to Moscow in order to learn how to do stroganoff, you know, that's what I did. I went all over the world to the root of the classic to find out how they did it and then interpret that back out. And, of course, because we were in multiple countries all over the world with the program, I had to think in terms of what that would be like as I recommended those ingredients and talked about those ingredients to people.

Interviewer: Is there any point in your career where you questioned being a chef and cooking and having a show and all your experiences?

Graham Kerr: Interesting. Um, Yes. It's what I call the crossroads experience. Life brings you to a place where it is perfectly clear that you have multiple choices. You can either go straight over, turn left, turn right, pull a U-turn, and go back. At a crossroads, you've got really those four alternatives. I became aware of my need truly as a result of my wife, Treena, having a stroke and a heart attack. You don't get strokes and heart attacks at 52 unless you have been having a regular diet, which is more than sensible. And that became crystal clear to me that I had actually wounded the person I love most, and that was my crossroads. So, what do I do about that? Just continue doing it because I was obviously successful or make a turn. So, I made a turn. And it was, I can't say, therefore, that I didn't appreciate all the effort I had put in. I did. But all the effort I had put in didn't really nourish; it malnourished. And that's hard, you know when you look at that. And I went back into my career and tried the best I could to retool the methods that I used in order to be able to get a healthier, a more nourishing result. So, I have this phrase now: nourish and delight. So, I love to do what I do now. Absolutely love it. But it isn't anywhere near as successful as what I did before.

Interviewer: When you said you went back and looked through your recipes to kind of make changes, did you just make changes to the original recipes you already had made and that were successful, or did you make whole new ones?

Graham Kerr: I did a whole series called Graham Kerr. And in which, I went back into my actual dishes that I did on the Galloping Gourmet, and I actually reorganized those on a little thing called Macs, which was a kind of desktop computer thing, where I would take ingredients off and put other ingredients in their place, and then go and do the dish. And I started to get a board, and I would mark up on the board the numbers that I was achieving with the changes. Now, all of that was just strictly what I was doing for Treena. And Treena died at 81 through an unrelated issue. So, she made it from 52 to 81, and we had a wonderful life together. And without any restrictions, just, I nourished her, and I cooked for her every day.

Interviewer: Thank you for listening to this excerpt from our interview with Graham Kerr. The complete interview is available in the University of Guelph Library’s Archival & Special Collections. Excerpts from all Culinary Milestones of Canadian Cooking interviews are available on YouTube. The interviews were created to supplement our 30th-anniversary exhibition of the Culinary Historians of Canada, which was launched on April 2, 2023, at the University of Guelph. For more information, please email mamcafee@uoguelph.ca.

(Interview Ends)