The original Japanese Iron Chef cooking show was both highly entertaining and massively influential on the cooking show genre. The show was simple in concept, but that simplicity made it so malleable and allowed for a long-running series that entertained many and is cited as an inspiration for many of today’s top chefs.

How did it work?

Iron Chef was a competitive cooking show where a challenger chef would challenge one of the Iron Chefs who were residents of the show. The Iron Chefs were considered the best in their respective cuisine, with the main Iron Chefs being French, Japanese’s, and Chinese. There was an Italian Iron Chef who was rarely engaged.

Most of the challengers originated from Asia and the show was dubbed into English from its original Japanese. The episodes focused on a style of cuisine and 1 key surprise ingredient that the challenger and the Iron Chef would need to create a menu around on the spot.

The contestants would then have an hour to prepare and cook the menu they come up with. While completing the menu was essential to winning, they also needed to impress the tasting judges by doing something unique with the key ingredient. In this sense, the show was focused around innovating in cooking on the spot with limited time.

It was considered a great honour for any challenger to face an Iron Chef, whether they won or lost. The show was always very respectful and never had any of the on-screen outbursts typical of other reality shows, especially competitive ones.

Why it’s iconic

Iron Chef is an iconic TV show because it was one of the first shows to make a spectacle out of cooking. It made the career of professional chef exciting and was entertaining for millions.

Colonel Sanders is popularly known as the mascot and founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken (now known mainly as KFC). Before KFC became internationally famous, it was started by Harland Sanders who used to run serve up simple dished at a gas station by the roadside.

Despite dying in 1980, Sanders and his likeness are world-famous for the connection to the KFC brand. Sanders originally created his recipe for fried chicken in the mid-1930s where his famous “11 herbs and spices” originated.

Sanders actually got into a shootout with a business rival early in his career, and the charges were dropped against him since he did not fire the first shot. Sanders was actually in the military and lied about his age to serve in Cuba in 1906, and was made an honorary colonel by the Governor of Kentucky Ruby Lafoon in 1935. Sanders embraced his honorary colonel title and discovered it was an effective marketing tactic to make him stand out from the competition.

Sanders had a very diversified job history before his fried chicken became world-famous. He had worked as a farmhand, and also worked in law and delivering babies as well. A brawl in the courtroom with a client ended his legal career, but he also operated a steamboat for some time.

Contrary to popular belief, the first official KFC franchise started in Utah and not Kentucky. Back then, KFC looked like a very unique regional menu in a place like Utah.

Sanders famously sued KFC after he sold the company because they wanted to block him starting his own chain after criticizing a drop in quality. They settled out of court on the condition that Sanders could give a cooking lesson to KFC executives.

That’s just some of the real history of Colonel Sanders.

Nigella Lawson never enjoyed being known as any kind of expert. She has often joked that greed is her only real qualification and that she has abysmal knife skills when compared to the multitude of other celebrity cooks. Only because she has been cooking for so long people refer to her as an expert, but she will always shy away from technical questions about cooking.

This is where the core appeal of Nigella and her cookbooks can be recognized. She appeals to people who don’t want to take cooking too seriously, and simply want to have fun making food that they can enjoy.

Nigella was never a professional chef, despite some people thinking she was. She was never even trained as a cook. Her first cookbook ‘How to Eat’ was simply made as an alternative to the very technical and intimidating cookbooks that many professional chefs were releasing into the market at that time.

The book was all about celebrating the pure pleasure of cooking and eating. It did not contain any photographs of perfectly plated dishes for people to compare themselves again. It was all about being fast, fun, and most importantly, approachable. She has said she was inspired to write the book after seeing her friend crying because a dessert she was making failed to set correctly.

While she is best known for her TV appearances, Nigella is an excellent writer. She was an experienced journalist before she started to pen cookbooks. Nigella was only in the midst of her mid-twenties at the time she became a professional restaurant critic. She later went freelance and ended up doing a bimonthly column in the New York Times.

Nigella Lawson is affectionately known by many as the queen of home cooking, and it’s not hard to see why.