Putting the Iron back into cooking

Mix Julia Child with "Wheel of Fortune," add a liberal dose of Saturday-afternoon Kung Fu film plus a few things that make no sense, and you have the perfect television show. Throw in some silly outfits, the occasional abalone and a few Japanese celebrities looking mildly sick to their stomachs, and it's a wonder anyone would even consider watching anything else.

Despite all of these charms and the added bonus of some of the most poorly dubbed dialogue this side of a USA Network showing of Natural Born Killers, "Iron Chef" remains on the periphery of the American television landscape. This is likely because the show airs on the "TV Food Network," a cable channel so obscure that even its hit shows draw approximately one- third the audience of the UPN's "Shasta McNasty."

Even in the tiny world of the Food Network, the Iron Chef rates as a minor celebrity compared to Emeril Lagasse. Though Emeril speaks in a Boston accent so thick that most of the country has no idea he's even hosting a cooking show, he has become a minor star by getting overly excited whenever he adds pepper to a dish. This has helped Emeril open a whole bunch of successful restaurants and sell a mess of cookbooks. It's also led to the unfortunate inclusion of pepper in just about everything he cooks.

While Emeril airs approximately eight times a day, "Iron Chef" has been banished to late Sunday nights opposite women's bowling and community affairs programming. The show runs in other slots, as the Food Network has a fairly limited budget, but it remains a cult hit at best.

Perhaps this has happened because "Iron Chef" has an incredibly confusing premise. A sort of cook-off with a twist, "Iron Chef" has been given a hard-to-believe back story involving a Japanese millionaire who commands a small unit of "Iron Chefs," who, for some unexplained reason, appear on this television show. Besides telling you that there are multiple Iron Chefs and not a single chef, the back story adds little to the show.

This hardly matters, because the actual cook-off portion of each episode provides more than enough entertainment. In these segments-all hilariously narrated by a voiceover full of inappropriate translations-one of the Iron Chefs and a competitor square off in a cooking contest.

No ordinary bakeoff, the competitors must make a variety of dishes in a few hours. That sounds easy enough, but the twist is that every dish must contain a special ingredient (which I think the "millionaire" picks, but it's hard to tell). That wildcard ingredient is invariably a food that would sicken most Americans, or at least one that seems difficult to use in two dishes, let alone half a dozen.

Using oddball ingredient like octopus, tofu and the aforementioned abalone would lead to some strange concoctions under normal circumstances, but the various Iron Chefs always take the weirdness a step further. The show's judges reward creativity, and in Japan, that appears to mean crafting ingredients that are neither hamburger nor hotdog-based into something that looks vaguely like one or the other. The Iron Chef usually even goes the extra mile by concocting fries out of beets, radishes or some other unappetizing non-potato.

In a just world, one of the networks would rescue "Iron Chef" from basic cable purgatory, perhaps making a few changes like casting Ricardo Montalban as the millionaire. Air this thing every night for a few months, and maybe Regis Philbin's reign of terror would come to an end.