Pioneer foodies gave us the appetite for reality TV hits such as MasterChef grand final

Long before Australia was obsessed with MasterChef and its rivals, it was a Belgian-born chef who introduced Australians to food on television.

Undated. Willi Koeppen.

Before Two Fat Ladies, Australia had The Galloping Gourmet and, long before Nigella’s sumptuous curves added spice to home cooking, prim home economist Florence Hanford turned out perfect pound cakes and crisp pie bases for 20 years on Television Kitchen.

With the final of the seventh ­series of the hugely popular MasterChef screening tonight (Ten, 7.30pm), cooking has proved the television equivalent of slow food, enduring as a staple since telecasts began locally in 1956, and ­internationally since 1946.

The pioneers of television cuisine were Philip Harben, a self-taught former RAF cook whose kitchen experience came from running a London residential club restaurant that listed novelist Agatha Christie as a client, and aspiring American actor James Beard.

Both premiered in 1946, Harben graduating from BBC radio broadcasts to 10-minute cookery telecasts, and Beard establishing himself as “The Dean Of American Cuisine” from a 15-minute NBC program, I Love To Eat.

Belgian-born Willi Koeppen was Australia’s first TV chef.

Harben’s first dish for audiences still restricted to post-war rationing was lobster vol-au-vent. Beard, who was tall, bald and ebullient with a big belly and big hands, published cook books and ran the New York restaurant Hors D’Oeuvre Inc.

Chef and restaurateur Dione Lucas also favoured French flavours on her program, To The Queen’s Taste, screened in New York from 1947. Her guests ­included artist Salvador Dali, and one episode ended in disaster as Lucas attempted to demonstrate a chocolate souffle for a live audience. It flopped when a studio electrician unplugged the oven on set.

Hanford, with her neat hair bun, made her first Television Kitchen show in 1949 in Philadelphia. It ran to 1000 shows over 20 years, when she boasted that she never repeated a recipe and never burnt a dish. Unlike her male predecessors, Hanford studied home economics at Temple University before joining Philadelphia Electric from the late 1930s. Wanting to boost television sales, in 1947 the company sponsored a variety show with a cooking segment.

The Galloping Gourmet Graham Kerr.

A model auditioned as the chef, but Hanford later told a newspaper “the model could not cook”, so she won the job, and two years later had her own show.

Ruler of the television kitchen in 1950s Britain was Phyllis Pechey, who went from washing dishes to dishing up glamorous Frenchified fare on Kitchen Magic for the BBC under the name Fanny Cradock.

Cradock rose to prominence in 1949 with a popular cookbook, The Practical Cook, which included such temptations as rose petal jam and baked hedgehog. Cradock was invited to give cooking demonstrations at luncheon clubs, which evolved into sell-out shows at theatres.

She wore a ball gown and tiara for theatre demonstrations, with fourth husband Johnnie dressed in top hat and tails as her hen-pecked sidekick. With a cookery column titled Bon Viveur, Cradock even gave English Yorkshire pudding a French name.

The glamorous Fanny Cradock.

Berlin-born chef Willi Koeppen introduced cookery to Australian television viewers on The Chef Presents, screened for five minutes from 1957, expanding to a 15-­minute slot by 1959, on HSV-7 in Melbourne.

Koeppen, who migrated to Australia in 1956 as executive chef at Melbourne’s five-star Chevron Hotel, and his wife Karin later purchased tearooms at Olinda, outside Melbourne, where they opened the Cuckoo Restaurant. Koeppen vanished in the early hours of February 29, 1976, possibly murdered by convicted killer Alex Tsakmakis.

British-born Graham Kerr, the son of London hoteliers, started his television cookery shows in New Zealand, where he became chief chef catering adviser for the Royal New Zealand Air Force in 1958.

Celebrity chef Bernard King was popular in the 1970s.

Kerr took a 35-day worldwide trek in 1967 to visit fine restaurants with wine expert Len Evans, ­another British-born New Zealander then based in Australia.

They published their experience as The Galloping Gourmets, the title later used for Kerr’s television cooking program.

Queensland-born English teacher Bernard King continued the tradition of flamboyant presentation on his half-hour cookery program King’s Kitchen.

By the mid-1980s, he was appearing at 10.30am in the Bernard King Show on Network Ten, reappeared at noon as a regular on Nine Network’s Mike Walsh Show and in the evening as resident chef on the Don Lane Show.

Originally published as Pioneer foodies gave us the appetite for reality TV hits such as MasterChef grand final