''I Love to Eat'' was a

live television Live television is a television production broadcast in real-time, as events happen, in the present. In a secondary meaning, it may refer to streaming television over the Internet when content or programming is played continuously (not on deman ...

series on

NBC The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is an American English-language commercial broadcast television and radio network. The flagship property of the NBC Entertainment division of NBCUniversal, a division of Comcast, its headquarters are l ...

that aired from August 30, 1946 to May 18, 1947, and was a cooking show hosted by chef and cookbook author

James Beard James Andrews Beard (May 5, 1903 – January 23, 1985) was an American chef, cookbook author, teacher and television personality. He pioneered television cooking shows, taught at The James Beard Cooking School in New York City and Seaside, ...

. The show is notable for having been the first network television cooking show.

Schedule

When the show started, each episode was 15 minutes long and presented at 8:30 p.m. EST on Fridays, immediately before '' The World in Your Home'' at 8:45 p.m. However, this was later changed to 30 minutes (April–May 1947) as more complicated recipes were demonstrated and prepared.

Format

The Borden-sponsored program opened with a sketch of Elsie, the famed Borden cow. Then Beard, appearing behind a kitchen counter, took over to demonstrate the preparation of some of his unique dishes for the live television audience.

Personnel

The program also featured Elsie de Wolfe, who was described as a "Manhattan socialite". The producer was Patricia Kennedy.

Episode status

No footage from the show remains, since methods to record live television such as

kinescopes Kinescope , shortened to kine , also known as telerecording in Britain, is a recording of a television program on motion picture film, directly through a lens focused on the screen of a video monitor. The process was pioneered during the 1940s ...

were not invented until 1947. However, an audio recording of one episode survives. As documented in the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library ...

archives, the audio recordings of episodes from ''I Love to Eat'' (as recorded from live TV broadcasts over WNBT-TV in NY in 1946-47) include a 1947 episode featuring a ski report and ski luncheon discussions by Beard. This is followed by prolonged live commercials from Borden including

Elsie the Cow Elsie the Cow is a cartoon cow developed as a mascot for the Borden Dairy Company in 1936 to symbolize the "perfect dairy product". Since the demise of Borden in the mid-1990s, the character has continued to be used in the same capacity for the ...

as show sponsor, while Beard recounts his dream about Elsie as part of the show. It was the successor to the ''Radio City Matinee'' (May 1946) program, which featured fashion, culture, art and cooking segments (including chefs George Rector and James Beard) and ''For You and Yours'' (successor show starting in June 1946, also featuring Beard in the kitchen), all on WNBT-TV in New York. Some cooking demonstration programs had preceded it on local TV pre-war broadcasts of 1939–1941.

References

External links