The Frugal Gourmet has selected a juicer…

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I might just as well tell you about my favorite equipment … brand names and all. I must be careful with this since you might think I am getting a little too commercial.

–JEFF SMITH, “The Frugal Gourmet Whole Family Cookbook”

A little too commercial? Jeff Smith, TV’s most popular chef and the author of numerous best-selling cookbooks, has been endorsing products for nearly a decade, fulsomely praising everything from a garlic press to a garbage disposal. “These are products that we recommend,” says Smith. “I don’t like the word “endorse’.”

Sorry, Frug, you’re a flack. And your new “The Frugal Gourmet Whole Family Cookbook,” just published with 350,000 copies in print, is an especially shocking example: here at last is the cookbook as infomercial. “This book is certainly less complicated than anything else we have done,” you write, explaining that its purpose is to help families prepare simple dinners together. A laudable goal-but how many simple family meals call for 18 pages’ worth of kitchen equipment including a Cameron smoker, a Le Creuset stove-top grill, Wilton insulated baking sheets and Anchor Hocking replicas of old-fashioned soda glasses?

What’s worse, you’re not alone. Today the distinction between advertising and independent thinking about food is on the brink of disappearing. “I know very few chefs who will not consider endorsing,” says Ellen Brown, a publicist specializing in food and wine. “Numbers of them have approached me over the years. They’re clamoring to represent products.”

Deals between prominent cooks and the food industry include everything from a recipe booklet for Jim Beam Bourbon produced by Julee Rosso, coauthor of The Silver Palate cookbooks, to a major promotion for Rose Levy Beranbaum’s “Rose’s Christmas Cookies” by the American Dairy Association. One increasingly popular gimmick is for a food company to sponsor the author’s tour when a new cookbook is published. Hugh Carpenter promoted Swanson chicken broth on his book tour for “Pacific Flavors.” “He’d have a can of it with him, and he’d just say, ‘Now you add some Swanson chicken broth’,” says Lisa Ekus, whose PR company handles many cookbooks. “It’s a soft-sell approach.” (Carpenter says he is no longer associated with Swanson.) Ekus has gone so far as to help a food company gain greater visibility in a cookbook currently being written. “The product was already being used in two or three recipes, but now there are four,” she says proudly.

Some of these deals are deceptive, others are merely distasteful. What the all share is the assumption that chefs, cookbook authors and freelance food writers have no need to take their profession seriously and maintain its integrity. Cooks insist they won’t support any product they don’t believe in, but with hundreds of cookbooks competing for attention and dozens of reputable chefs eager to elbow their way to national fame, it’s easy for food companies to win the affections of an expert. “Chefs are now agents of the culinary industry,” says Dana Glazer, a senior account executive at the PR firm Hill and Knowlton, who has worked on several such promotions. “You’re selling-let me use another word, you’re using their reputation as the vehicle to introduce the product.” Three years ago Craig Claiborne, former food editor of The New York Times, happened to meet the owner of the Edgecraft knife-sharpener company. “He said, ‘Would you consider endorsing my knife sharpener?’” says Claiborne. “I said, ‘Well, I better try it first.’ I tried it and fell in love with it. Of its sort, it’s the finest knife sharpener ever created.” Now he hawks Edgecraft knife sharpeners in department-store cooking demonstrations around the country. He’s also active as a freelance food journalist, but finds no ethical dilemma in his dual career. “I don’t see any conflict,” he says.

Hardly anybody sees a conflict. On TV, the distinction between commercials and news features barely gets a nod when the subject is food. When she arranges TV appearances, Glazer says, the producers understand that the interviews are meant to showcase the product. “We tell them, “We’re offering someone to you for interviews, she’ll demonstrate recipes using this product’,” she says. “Sometimes they’ll be sensitive about a chef mentioning it by name, but that’s infrequent.”

Dana Dwinell, a Chicago-based TV producer who has handled many talk-show cooking segments, says most shows have no official policy regarding endorsements. “What happens is, we’ll tell them we’ll allow only two mentions of the product,” she says. “After all, people pay big money for that kind of advertising.” Ethical questions aside, why would a station permit free advertising at all? " That’s the only way you can get some of the big chefs,” says Dwinell.

Food professionals agree that the network shows are a bit touchier about name-dropping than local or cable shows tend to be. A spokeswoman for “Good Morning America” says ABC’s division of standards and practices does not allow endorsements except in regular commercials. But policies can be as full of holes as a colander. Michael McLaughlin, whose tour for a chili cookbook was partially sponsored by Southern Comfort, says that before appearing on “Good Morning America” he asked if he could wear a Southern Comfort apron during his spot. The answer was no. “But they never said not to talk about it,” he says. “I talked about bread pudding with a Southern Comfort sauce. They didn’t mind.”

For the most part neither the cooks nor the food companies will discuss how much money changes hands. Jeff Smith says he doesn’t have a financial stake in every product he mentions; he does earn money (he won’t say how much) from products he advertises directly including wine and glassware. He also gets a cut from items sold in Frugal Gourmet shops located in department stores around the country. Last year Marion Cunningham, author of the revised Fannie Farmer cookbooks, made a dozen salads with iceberg lettuce, recorded the recipes for an 800 number, talked up iceberg at a produce show in Boston and took home $40,000 from the California Iceberg Lettuce Commission. “It was a ridiculous amount of money,” she admits. “Food writers don’t make a lot of money,” says Paula Wolfert, an expert on Moroccan and Mediterranean food who represents Courvoisier. “What are you going to do? You can’t sell your book to the movies.”

Not all chefs go commercial, but purists are few. Alice Waters, owner of Berkeley, Calif.’s Chez Panisse restaurant, once appeared in an ad for Pacific Bell but has never plugged a food product. “I’m revolted by it,” she says. “But people really try to make you offers you can’t refuse.”

Perhaps the best-known chef/flack of them all was the late James Beard, whose commercial career was legendary. Starting in the 1950s, according to his biographer Robert Clark, he promoted cognac, beer, meat tenderizer, bourbon, frozen vegetables, spices, kitchen equipment and more. “Jim Beard says, “Meals can be exotic!”’ ran a 1962 ad for raspberry preserves. ““I found this glazed frankfurter recipe in a village in Europe’.”

Beard was beloved by both his friends and his public in his lifetime; now, however, it’s hard to know how much to trust his writings on food and culinary history. Once a cook agrees to be a mouthpiece for a food company, that compromise raises questions about the rest of his or her work.

“If cooks genuinely love a product and it’s the best one for the recipe, they should be able to mention it,” says Judith Jones, a longtime cookbook editor at Knopf. “It’s a matter of conscience. But … conscience is a frail thing.” Chefs and cookbook writers are offering us not just recipes but their opinions, their imaginations and their integrity. If all that goes up for sale, they have nothing to offer us that we can’t get from the back of the box.

Photo: Oven Mitt

Photo: PAULA WOLFERT: Here’s a nice, easy recipe: just add a little of this delicious Courvoisier, stir well-and be sure to get the bottle on camera

Photo: FRUGAL GOURMET: His books are best sellers, his TV shows draw huge audiences, but Jeff Smith has something else to sell you. Surely you need an authentic imitation soda-fountain glass.