Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
January 2020 seems like a long time ago, but the questions generated by Paris Hilton’s one-and-done YouTube cooking demo, Cooking with Paris, live on. From the outset, it is clear that Paris is carving her own path in the world of cooking demos. She enters with her sous chef, a Chihuahua that she is holding in her hands. The dog is wearing a diamond bedazzled Chanel garment Paris refers to as an “apron.” Paris is wearing fingerless gloves, which she refers to as “chef gloves.” Even before the present crisis put a strong focus on hand washing, it is really something to see someone hosting a cooking show wearing gloves put a dog down, and use those same gloved hands to open a bag of lasagna noodles.
The textbook stand-and-stir cooking show model has been pretty standard since Julia Child and Joyce Chen pioneered the genre back in the 1960s. The book says that you want to have your ingredients and equipment staged before you start shooting, to save time and to create an impression of effortlessness. It appears Paris Hilton has not read that book. She complains that she has the wrong kind of noodles – they are regular, rather than no-boil lasagna noodles – and also complains that she has the kind of mozzarella that you have to grate, which she grumbles about while doing. This approach might make sense if the idea of the show was to whip something up out of whatever you find in the fridge, but she tells us that she is showing us how to make her “Infamous Lasagna.” Instead, she laments that shredding cheese is “brutal.” If you imagine Fran Leibowitz forced to host a bass fishing show, the mood is be about the same.
When Paris starts to make the sauce, she starts a burner on the stove, and warns “be careful if you have long hair, because it can light on fire.” It is worth noting that she is wearing her hair down throughout the video. (It is not clear if she considers the likelihood that some of her own long hair will wind up in the sauce as a feature or a bug.) The sauce is a journey. She puts two pounds of ground beef in a pan that she immediately decries as being too small. She tells us she does not know the exact measure, and then waves a container of sea salt over the ground beef, with a fair amount missing the pan, to which she exclaims “oh, no!” We then get a black and white instant replay of the gaffe, with a brief stab of Laugh-In style music. Here, especially, it is fair to wonder what Paris and her team are up to. It seems unlikely that she is actually trying to compete with the likes of the Barefoot Contessa or even Sandra Lee, and might be doing the whole thing for laughs. Or, as someone who has enjoyed a lifetime of being famous for being famous, she may feel that the power of her brand will carry her over any small obstacles like using a metal spatula in a nonstick pan. Or deciding not to include garlic or onions in her sauce. (“Alright, [sigh], I was supposed to chop these onions and garlic,” she announces with exasperation after clearly realizing she forgot these crucial ingredients, “but I feel my lasagna should not have onion or garlic in it.”)
The kitchen where all of this cooking happens is also kind of magical. From what we can see, it looks like a fancy kitchen in a demo house in a new development. It departs from that standard with the décor. On the granite-topped island, in no particular order, are a dozen roses with baby’s breath in a bouquet (like a figure skater would receive), two Chinese urns, a gilded statue of Mickey Mouse, a plastic Minnie Mouse, a porcelain bust of Marilyn Monroe, as well as a container of Paris’s own Unicorn Mist, which she pauses to apply to herself (but “not on the food”) mid-sauce prep.
When the sauce is done, the lasagna comes together in fairly standard form – sauce, cheese, noodles, repeat, top with mozzarella, bake. The finished product is of a scale that Paris seems to struggle to get it in and out of the oven, but the video does end with a plausible lasagna at the end.
On one level, this kind of thing is all about #engagement, and Paris asks her viewers to suggest what she should cook next week on Cooking With Paris. That was in January. Since then, she has been busy sharing the details of her quarantine lifestyle on her YouTube channel – spoiler, her quarantine is a bit more elaborate than yours is, probably. The single episode of Cooking With Paris has pulled over 4.1 million views, many times more than any of her other videos, but she has yet to return to this formula. It is surprisingly hard to pin down what is going on in this video: does Paris sincerely want to share the good news about her lasagna, or is this an elaborate goof? It’s hard for us to find the line between sincerity and prank, but based on the arc of her entire career, that might be hard for Paris herself to discern. From reality TV to DJ sets, pretty much everything Ms. Hilton has done has attracted both inordinate attention and disproportionate scorn, which is what happens, I guess, when you are both famous for being famous, and famous for being disliked.
Ultimately, Cooking With Paris raises more questions than it answers. Questions like “will there ever be a second episode?” and “why”? But maybe most urgently, “What’s the deal with that kitchen?” This video has professional production values, with a variety of pans, zooms, and motion graphics that would be hard to pull off with just a friend with an iPhone. The kitchen itself is has upscale-ish appliances and the requisite granite countertops, but is equipped with stuff like you would find in the drawers at a summer rental. Given the usual focus on having all of the ingredients and tools in place for a cooking show, it’s weird to see Paris thrashing around in a drawer for a spatula-like object, or using a potato masher to stir ground beef. It’s not clear whose kitchen it is, or if Paris has ever been in it before.
Which brings us back to the question of what, exactly, Paris was thinking when she dropped this video? It is too clumsy to be a serious bid for a Nigella Lawson style reboot of Paris’s brand, but seems to take itself too seriously to be a goof that Paris threw together for a lark. The bigger question: in 2020, who does Paris Hilton want us to think she is? Is this lasagna prep as performance art?
Jonathan Beecher Field was born in New England, educated in the Midwest, and teaches in the South. He Tweets professionally as @ThatJBF, and unprofessionally as @TheGurglingCod. He also sometimes writes for Avidly and Common-Place.
