In her sophomore year of college, Melissa
d’Arabian studied abroad in France, living
with a host couple i n a town in the Loire
Valley. Madame Gabillet cooked dinner
every night, and a frequent dish was
seared chicken with pan sauce. ‘‘She was
not very extroverted,’’ d’Arabian recalls.
‘‘A little bit timid.’’ But as she watched her
host cook with confi dence in an every-
day kind of way, d’Arabian, now 53 and
a cookbook author, began to understand
that the chicken was not so much a recipe
as it was a strong technique. It was, she
surmised, ‘‘real French cooking.’’
Years later, in 2009, I was sitting on my
parents’ couch in Atlanta the night d’Ara-
bian cooked a dish on television inspired
by Madame Gabillet’s chicken, which
earned her the Season 5 crown on ‘‘The
Next Food Network Star.’’ I was 18 and20 2.13.22 Photograph by Linda Xiao Food stylist: Sue Li. Prop stylist: Pamela Duncan Silver.
Couch Potatoes: Every day after school, a generation
learned to cook from Food Network stars.
Eat By Eric Kim
Madame Gabillet’s
chicken offers
an example to apply
widely and freely.counting down the days until I might get
to deglaze a pan on TV (and say the word
‘‘deglaze’’) while competing for a shot at
my own show. But what was my culinary
point of view? Who was ‘‘Eric’’ on a plate?
When I wasn’t baking box-mix cakes, I
was practicing my presentation skills in
front of the bathroom mirror.
It took several years for me to recognize
the impact that those TV shows had on my