Portrayals of chefs and professional cooks are most memorable when they're extreme.
Books such as Jacques Pepin's memoir, The Apprentice, and Michael Ruhlman's trilogy, The Making of a Chef, The Soul of a Chef and The Reach of a Chef, may be of interest to food professionals, but more people will remember Anthony Bourdain's best-selling Kitchen Confidential, in which chefs are typically bad boys fuelled by drugs, cigarettes and alcohol.
Likewise with cooking shows on television. What sticks in your mind longer: Rick Stein's tips on the correct way to make a beurre blanc, or Gordon Ramsay letting off a string of expletives at a cringing, incompetent minion?
As in real-life kitchens, most movie chefs are male. Exceptions include Tampopo, Babette's Feast and Mostly Martha - a German film remade this year as No Reservations, starring a temperamental Catherine Zeta-Jones.
What food films have in common is that the chefs - whether male, female or rat (in the case of the latest, Ratatouille) - are passionate about their craft, and have to fight to be able to cook what they want. In Big Night, an Italian immigrant chef cooks for clientele who prefer spaghetti and meatballs to authentic cuisine. He finally wows them with a no-holds-barred meal that includes an elaborate dome-shaped timbale.
In Babette's Feast, the members of an ascetic religious sect are so poor that there's not much to cook apart from unseasoned boiled dried fish. When Babette wins the lottery, she pours her repressed cooking skills (and her winnings) into the type of meal she cooked at her restaurant in Paris.
Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman features a chef who loses his sense of smell (and, therefore, his taste). He gets both back when he falls in love.