You'll never see a man on a cooking show gasping and groaning over the way something tastes -- over-sensualizing their pleasure from food. "Oh that's serious," Bourdain will say, wiping some beastly innards off his face, taking a swig of Heineken. Emeril and Fieri will bark as if they're at a ball game. Batali will explain why something is good, rather than simply express how happy he is to eat it. Some kinds of cooking -- grilling, artisanal curing, brawny offal-centric preparations -- tend to have hyper-masculine devotees. Molecular gastronomy -- food science, art, and fantasy in a delicious jumble -- is safe too -- because it's so dramatically removed from the drudgery of home-cooking. Every now and then, you see a gentle man cooking on television, and the effect is jarring. In March, celebrated Manresa chef David Kinch schooled Bobby Flay on Iron Chef. Even though his restaurant is a destination, the soft-spoken and terroir-enthused Kinch will never have product tie-ins -- commercial mayonnaise, kitchen gear, spice rubs, etc -- on Flay's level -- even in the unlikely event he wanted to in the first place. He'd rather build "tide-pools" of fresh shellfish and sea beans languishing in dashi-laced green tomato broth and go surfing in his spare time. One of my favorite cooking shows was Charlie Trotter's original Kitchen Sessions on PBS in the late 1990s. Amid a loose jazz soundtrack, Trotter very softly presented his thesis: cooking is a cycle of improvisations where time-tested techniques meet endlessly changing circumstances and opportunities for adjustment. The food was high-concept, challenging but within reach. As a host, he was a soothing presence -- murmuring vaguely poetic asides, often looking away from the camera, frequently indulging in tangential digressions appropriate to his show's statement of purpose. Trotter has been very successful, but his show, at least in that incarnation, didn't last more than a year or two. Ironically, Trotter actually made a cameo in the 1997 movie My Best Friend's Wedding, in which he convincingly played the stereotype of a blustery chef, bellowing at an assistant: "I will kill your whole family if you don't get this right!" It's a better joke now, twelve years later.

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