Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein, and this is the podcast

Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

And I'm Mark Scarborough.

And together with Bruce, my husband, we have written three dozen cookbooks.

We are in the editorial process of the three dozen and first, three dozens and

first, I don't even know how to say it.

That cookbook.

37.

Yeah.

How about 37?

37 cookbooks.

Bruce has written a couple of knitting books.

I've written a memoir about the great works of Western literature and my life.

We've done a lot in publishing, but this is our podcast about our

major passion for food and cooking in this episode of our podcast.

As always, we've got a one minute cooking tip.

We want to talk about cooking videos and the way they've changed in the

25 years we've been in this business.

They have changed quite a bit.

We may go even a little bit farther back than that from our

start in the business in 99.

And we want to tell you what's making us happy in food this week.

So let's get started.

bruce (2): Our one minute cooking tips.

Boxed cakes from the bakery often go pretty stale pretty fast.

They stick around?

Well, but if they do.

But they don't have a lot of preservers in them, like a supermarket cake.

They do?

They stick around?

And if, well, when we have leftover cake, the last thing I want to do.

Leftover cake?

You say words that I don't know what they mean.

Please go on.

I do not want to wrap the cake itself in saran wrap or plastic because

that is kind of messy and disgusting.

No, it is.

It's so obvious and people don't think about it.

Put the cake back in the box, wrap the entire box in plastic wrap.

That only works if you have one of those giant rolls of plastic

wrap from the big box store.

You could do it with one from the regular supermarket.

You just have to go around a few times, turn the box and go the other direction.

Just seal it up tight and it'll stay fresh.

All right.

Well, I mean, it is a way to keep things fresh.

Sure, they're not going to stay forever.

No, but they'll stay a few days as opposed to being stale by the next morning.

True.

True.

That is all true.

Okay.

There's your one minute cooking tip about plastic wrap and cakes in boxes, I guess.

Interesting.

Before we get to the next part of this podcast, let me say

that we do have a newsletter.

We just had one come out last week.

If you're interested in subscribing to our newsletter, you can go to our website.

bruceandmark.

com or cookingwithbruceandmark.

com either way you can sign up there for the newsletter and again

you can always unsubscribe at any moment and we do not collect nor sell

your name nor your email address.

Alright up next what has happened to all the millions of cooking

videos starting with Julia Child and PBS and moving to TikTok.

Julia Child was a pioneer.

She wanted to teach Americans about French food.

Have you ever seen those, um, back behind the scenes stills of Child in her cooking?

show that was on PBS.

Have you ever seen that?

And she's standing there leaning over the counter.

She kind of leaned forward onto the counter always because she was

such a very tall person, right?

Wasn't she?

She was tall and they didn't, for some reason, just raise the counter.

Yeah.

So she's always kind of pitched forward slightly at the counter.

And then if you look at the behind the scene photos, there are dozens of people

on the floor all around her feet, like Handing of the spatulas up and all things

in their hands and Mike people gets back in the day when the sound person had to

be right next to you for your microphone.

And it's almost like she's a Muppet.

And it was Sesame Street.

It is almost as if there's so many people on the floor around her.

Our idea was to teach you new techniques, French techniques, things that yeah.

Most American cooks had no idea from a souffle to a Charlotte to

maybe we all know this, but back in the day, now we're talking like the

late eighties, early nineties when cooking shows got very popular on PBS.

I was one of those people that would record most like I, Justin, somebody I

guarantee what goes on that Louisiana guy.

Yeah.

I can't think of his name.

And I would watch these cooking shows.

And I would actually be the one who recorded them.

I know on a VCR, probably on a beta for that matter, but on a VCR tape,

because I wanted to play the Mac and stop them to copy down the recipe.

So I remember being that into cooking videos that I was actually.

Getting the recipe off the video and she was really into

teaching was she entertaining?

Yes, I think so And I think a lot of people watched her cuz she was

entertaining but she I believe thought of herself as a teacher Yeah, I

more than anything else myth of her entertainment value has grown since

her passing and I think the myth has even grown more with the Julia and

Julia books and then the Julia child biopic that happened I think that

That myth of her being an entertaining celebrity, uh, has really grown.

I'm not sure if you go back and watch those shows, how truly entertaining

they're, they're interesting to watch.

They are really interesting from a historical standpoint to see where

we started with this whole technique.

But also.

They are informative, and she was first and foremost a teacher, and you

didn't get the entertainment out of those kind of shows until people like

Graham Kerr came along, you know, Mr.

Galloping Gourmet, and he was always drinking wine and getting drunk while

he was cooking, and he made it fun.

Yeah, kind of.

He was very, um, out front, let's just say.

But, uh, I think when Bruce and I entered the business, it was

early days of the Food Network.

I'm going to tell you a story about that in a minute.

And it was the Mario Batali days.

It was the very early days of Rachel Ray on the Food Network.

Um, and Sarah Moulton, these people, Sarah Moulton was on like

five days a week or something.

She was.

When we entered the business.

An Emeril, oh my goodness.

An Emeril Lagasse.

Yep.

Right, exactly.

And I should say that we went on the Food Network, well Bruce did, went on the Food

Network and I helped as his food stylist.

1997.

Yeah, really early and.

In this initial appearance on the Food Network, it literally happened

in an abandoned floor of a Midtown Manhattan office building, and the

Food Network was not what it is now.

And so they had taken over a couple floors of this, this office building

in central Midtown Manhattan.

And literally, there were electrical wires, this is long before internet wires,

there were electrical wires hanging from the ceiling, they were still flying.

phones on the desks.

And I was his food stylist and where I was given to prepare.

He did frozen drinks on air where I was given to prepare

was literally like a desk.

It had somebody like an old secretary's desk.

It had phone numbers scratched by like a knife into the surface of the desk.

I had written a book called frozen drinks with or without the buzz.

And it was very popular.

It was my first book came out in 1997.

It was.

And so I got on the food network with Donna Hanover, the former.

Rudy Giuliani's wife, David Rosengarten and Donna Hanover, and

they just talked to me about it.

Mark had to make the drinks.

Um, there we are.

And Mark took the recipes and on his way to that other place to make the

drinks, he said to me, you know, I've never made a frozen drink before,

but they didn't have a test kitchen.

They didn't have people.

So that's what we had to do.

A frozen drink to me was a nice Cuban bourbon.

So what did I know about frozen drinks?

The Food Network was a real shift to go from PBS, which is.

It's informational and educational to entertainment.

And I really think that most of those people, Rachel Ray and

Emeril, they weren't about teaching.

They were about entertainment.

Oh, maybe.

I, I think that they were a little bit of a mix, but I can say that in

those very days, this is when Bruce and I would get hired by, you know,

National Commodity Boards like the U.

S.

Potato Board, the National Potato Board.

They're different, by the way.

That's a whole story.

The different food boards got hired by Jeff once, and

we got hired to make videos.

And when I look back on those videos that we made, let's say in 01, 02,

back then, Those videos are so dull.

We are so serious.

We were not entertaining.

We had, no, the boards didn't want you to be entertained.

They wanted you to show how to make potatoes.

If they wanted entertainment, they would have hired one of those

celebrities, but we were experts.

We'd written a potato book, we'd written a peanut butter book.

So we were the experts and they wanted us to To show that and we,

we must have made oh, two dozen, maybe two dozen videos for chow.com.

Remember the old chow.com?

We must have made two dozen videos for them and there's very

little entertainment in them.

I think I make chocolate goat cheese truffles in one of them.

Yeah.

And I'm a little bit silly with the chocolate on my hands, but

even the director at Chow, and this would be like oh 2, 0 3, she was,

uh, calming me down and making me.

make sure that I didn't go over the top with these truffles.

I think that that was a big shift.

And then of course, we still stayed.

It's really interesting.

The food business started to change much more for the entertainment space, but

we stayed in the informational space.

We did.

And I think The shift for us where we started to become a little more

entertaining was when the publicist for one of our books got us on this

morning show in Wilmington, Delaware, and that was CN eight was there was

the channel and it was one of the cable was still early on and you'd turn on

your cable box and they would be the channel that was the default channel.

So when you turned on Comcast, You know, cable, this was the channel that came

on your set and we were on doing set.

Listen to me, listen to how old I am.

Please go ahead.

So we did a, we did one cooking segment on there and we were kind of funny.

We'd sort of did our Bruce and Mark jokes, but they loved us and they

gave us the opportunity now, come on.

And so we would go once a month, we'd do one live and shoot four and

it was so much fun because for two years we got this opportunity to

build our on camera personas, learn how to be funny with each other.

And um, that led us, and we were silly in those early morning segments on that

show and that led us out to all kinds of appearances on today's show and Fox

and Friends and Good Morning America.

It was hard.

I want to emphasize that one of the things that was hard for us is we were

trying to go from a very informational space where, okay, this is how you

make brownies to a kind of funny.

Oh, who didn't love brownies?

Let's all eat brownies.

Here's one way to make more brownies in your life.

We were trying to make that transition and we were not necessarily always

adept at making that transition.

I can say that Mark was better at it than I was, and he would constantly say

to me, Smile, or don't be so into the recipe, you have to be entertaining.

And I think the culmination of when we got to be the first The

funniest happened on the view.

Barbara Walters had actually seen us on the Today Show and Mark made some

snarky comments on the Today Show host and Barbara Walters, so that was funny.

She had some of her people contact our publicist and asked us to go on The View.

Yeah, we did.

And we went on The View and, um, I didn't, I don't want to tell this whole story

because it's a, it's a long story with The View, but let's just say that the

actor before us was this guy on Desperate Housewives and he was just a total downer.

And he had He sat there on the sofa with them all in the view, and he was like,

Uh, you know, every guy gets killed on Desperate Housewives, so who knows

how long I'm gonna be on that show.

And he was just, he brought the whole audience down.

So I was determined to bring the audience up.

I ended up going out and telling this huge gay joke.

Yes, a gay joke in like 2002 on The View.

It brought the whole house down.

Oh my god.

Joy Behar actually went ballistic because you out funnied her.

I just did.

And she got really irritated.

No, I don't know what irritated.

Just to tell you, and this is a complete side point because we wouldn't really

want to talk about this information versus entertainment thing, um, uh,

one of the things that happened is we walked off the view and they offered

us a 10 segment deal that we could come back 10 times for each segment.

each of the books we had published up to that point and be on the view and

our publisher would not support it.

And just in case you don't know all the food stylist, all the prop stylist,

all the things you use in cooking segments on major network shows all

cost money to pay for your segment on the view can cost your publisher

up to 10 grand, seven to 10 grand.

It's union house.

It's union rules.

You know, from this, you got to pay for the sound guy to Mike,

you, you got to pay for everything.

Bruce and I did not have the money to front this on our own and the publisher

refused because of course a publisher thinks well your backlist is your

backlist and we don't sell your backlist we only sell your current book and you

were on for your current book so ta da.

In case you don't realize that the tv shows from the today show to the

view they don't pay for their guests.

No they do not.

In fact some of them charge their guests to come on.

They charge people like you and me to come on.

So that's how that happened but and then Something interesting happened.

The internet.

Well, yes.

That could have changed everything.

The internet changed everything.

And again, you can watch us.

And just to say, this is how it's gone.

You can watch us make this change.

Because we started when the internet, you know, happened.

And cooking videos happened.

I seem to always be the one.

pushing Bruce into his discomfort zone.

So I was like, we have to start making cooking videos.

And he was like, no, no, I don't want to, I don't want to,

this has always been his thing.

I don't want to be in front of a camera.

I said that since book one, I do not want to be in television.

You must be behind.

the camera, and all this stuff.

And I was like, no, no, we gotta do this.

So we started making these YouTube videos, which you can find on the

channel, cooking with Bruce and Mark.

And they, many of them are very serious.

I'm a little more insane than Bruce is in the videos, but they're pretty

serious and they're pretty like, okay, this is the way you make, uh, videos.

Bread and butter pickles.

Yeah.

This is the way you make kimchi.

We were sort of following the style of websites like craftsy.

com and we've talked about craftsy before.

It's a place, it's a place you can go and you pay a subscription price

and you get to watch all these classes on sewing and knitting.

And cooking and we've done a couple of cooking classes together.

Mark's done five, the total between the two of us is six classes.

I even have a knitting class on there and they're very serious.

Some of those are not entertaining at all.

When I watch other people's classes, they are just very serious on how to do it.

So, and they're very long format.

You know, each segment is going to be.

10, 20, even 30 minutes.

Some of our early Craftsy videos are 30 minutes of session.

And it wasn't until social media that videos started to get shorter.

and funnier, and just really about entertainment.

Yeah, and so what's happened over the course of time is, I find that what

has happened is, we swung way to the entertainment pendulum, and cooking

became, um, you know, a bunch of game shows on the Food Network, and, you

know, taking real people to make high end five star dishes or whatever, and

seeing how they screw it up, and it all turned into this entertainment thing.

Then you have the great of the great British baking show.

And that is much less about the actual product because

you don't learn to make those.

Not really.

You may learn some terminology for baking, but it's going to be UK terminology.

And it's not really about teaching you how to bake it also into entertainment.

But what I find now, and this is what's so interesting is I find it swinging back.

So I follow you probably know this.

If you listen to this podcast, I follow a lot of UK chefs on

Tik TOK and on Instagram reels.

And it's mostly because in anytime I cook anymore, it's vegan.

And so I follow all these really High end vegan chefs.

They have restaurants or they're high end in vegan influencers,

and it's not downgrade stuff It's you know, trying to get all the

processed food out and vegan food.

So I've been watching them and yes, are they entertaining?

Yes, are some of the boys shirtless?

Yes.

All of this is the truth But they're very serious about the recipes and the

recipes then occur under the video.

And they, they're very precise down to grams and milliliters.

So what I think is happening is while the entertainment's happening up on the

screen, if you want the information, it's sitting down in the comments.

And part of that.

came out of the fact just that these videos are shorter.

We're looking at 30 second, maybe 45 second videos, and the entertainment of

it is in the way it's shot, the way they look, the way it's lit, the way they deal

with food, their reactions to eating it.

Their makeup.

Yep.

All of that is, all of that is part of it.

And so we, have had to really work at creating a balance

between fun and educational.

I edit all of our videos and I try really hard to make that a fun part of it.

Right, because we still come out, we're old, and we still come

out of that informational space.

And I think both of us really still always look for information.

And we seek information rather than entertainment most of the time.

Now listen, after we eat dinner at night, we usually go downstairs and watch

some Scandinavian or UK crime series.

So, um, yes.

Do we watch lowbrow stuff?

Of course.

But at the same time, when it comes to cooking and food, both of us are

very into I mean, Bruce endlessly watches, um, Chinese chefs making

various, um, quote unquote, authentic.

That's a buzzword.

That's hard to define, quote unquote, authentic versions

of Szechuan or Hakka dishes.

He watches and some of those videos are quite long.

They are.

But I want to recreate those because having Chinese dinner parties is one of

my favorite things in the world to do.

But I think what's happened to Our work in video world has been a

struggle, but we've come through it.

And I think if anything, I'm really proud of our adaptability.

Yeah, I think that's the key.

I mean, the media landscape is constantly changing.

The gatekeepers are largely gone.

Yes.

Is there a gatekeeper for the Today Show or Good Morning America?

Of course.

Um, is there a gatekeeper for my publisher, Little Brown,

our publisher, Little Brown?

Of course there's gatekeepers.

We have to go through, we have a literary agent.

There's all kinds of gatekeepers.

who we have to pass through.

But in the general scheme of things, the gatekeepers are much less

important than they used to be.

You can get yourself your own cooking channel on any of

the platforms at this point.

You can start it yourself.

And I think that this, uh, balance between entertainment and information is always

constantly changing and you have to be ready for how it changes around you.

Because if you sit in the all entertainment space, I can

tell you right now, like your videos are just going to be.

Funny or gross out.

There's a lot of gross out cooking videos.

Mm-Hmm.

on TikTok and a lot of people making food that no one would ever eat.

Just to be gross about making, I don't know.

Ham.

Ham.

I saw one just the other day with hamburgers, with marshmallows

and cocoa powder mixed into them.

So, I mean, this is clearly just a, oh, did I mention it's a

cheeseburger with marshmallows?

Oh, even better.

And cocoa powder.

I know this is just clearly in the microwave.

I can fill you in on the whole thing.

Well, it just keeps getting better.

I know.

It's clearly just a ridiculous video to make you gross out.

And that is entertainment and funny in its own way in the microwave on a paper plate.

I'm just going to keep building it.

It's just not anything anybody would even want the recipe for.

No, no, no.

But, again, I think that those purely entertainment videos are starting to wane.

And people are actually looking for, Okay, well, how do I make I don't know what

cauliflower steaks with chili crisp sauce.

And so they're, I'm speaking of me now, and how do I make that?

And they're looking for the actual recipes and the, the goal here or

the, the, the, well, I don't know, the goal, what is it, the methodology

here is what you said, adaptability.

Yeah.

You have to be adaptable if you want to play in this game.

And I'm really proud of what we've done.

Yeah.

If you want to see what we've done, you can check it out on our Tik Tok

channel, cooking with Bruce and Mark.

We also have a Facebook group cooking with Bruce and Mark.

And if Bruce will ever get his rear end in gear, we do have an Instagram.

Instagram channel called Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

He's supposed to be working on that, uh, but he's not right now.

But, uh, Mark is, uh, prompting him right here on air.

Okay.

There's our little plug for our TikTok channel and our Instagram

channel and the Facebook group.

And now we get to the traditional last segment of our podcast, what's

making us happy in food this week.

I've been eating a lot of Blue House bagels and I know I think we've talked

about them or I've even interviewed the owner of Blue House bagels in Canton,

Connecticut because they make some of the best bagels I've ever had in my life.

If you don't remember or didn't remember the episode or haven't heard

it, they make sour dough bagels.

So all they make are sour dough bagels.

I like the plain ones, I like the salt ones, I like the ones with

olive oil and rosemary and za'atar.

I love the ones with olive oil and rosemary.

She also makes, you know, peach melba and french toast bagels, which I don't

necessarily approve of, but her bagels sell out every single day by 2 p.

m., and I had a bagel today, I had a bagel yesterday, and her

bagels, uh, Blue House bagels, are making me happy and food this week.

And so, now, I get to say what's making me happy and food this week, and it's

something that grosses Bruce out that he made for me, and it's egg salad.

Oh, gross.

Bruce hates egg salad.

I am a good Southern boy and I love egg salad.

I like it.

Here you go.

Ready?

I like it with mayonnaise and a little mustard, yellow mustard,

and then celery and pickle relish.

That's how I like it.

It's really delicious.

I like a little onion, but you didn't put onion in it, right?

Never for you.

Yeah, I know.

Saddest thing.

I like raw onion, but raw onion doesn't like me.

So it's a thing.

But anyway, um, I had egg salad on toast for lunch and I loved it.

It reminds me of being a kid at my grandmother's house and eating egg salad.

So.

Bye.

And whether Bruce likes it or not, I could care less.

But he makes it for you.

He does.

All right, that's the podcast for this week.

Thanks for being on this podcast journey with us.

We certainly appreciate your spending time with us.

And every week we tell you what's making us happy in food, so go to

our Facebook group, Cooking with Bruce and Mark, and tell us what's

making you happy in food this week.

We want to know, we want to read about it, and if it sounds really

delicious, we might even make it, here on Cooking with Bruce and Mark.