They first came to my attention in 2016. At the time I was in the midst of construction on our property up north. I looked for videos on timber framing, which are few and far between. So the Youtube algorithm substituted homesteaders and rural farm to table cooking and soon the Azerbaijan videos came up. There was an elderly man who made a fire next to a stream and cooked his simple lunch on the embers of driftwood. The camera shots were interesting, a beautiful valley surrounded by mountains. My brother Jim and I used to make fires by a lake and cook sausages. I still remember how good they tasted, taking small hot bites of sausage off a sharpened stick.
The videos were strangely fascinating. There was no music, or talking, just the natural sounds of the location, and there was no rush to action. Sometimes the old man drank tea and enjoyed the scenery with you. He challenged you. You wanted ambition, construction, accomplishment. He wanted quiet, lunch, and the breath of fresh air. The videos were so contrarian they captured your attention, and then your imagination. You also learned how people cooked in a very old part of the world.
Soon there were others. During the covid collapse of civilization a young Azerbaijani returned to his parents farm and started to make videos. Again, no talking or music, just his middle aged, rural parents as the stars of “this is how we live in the country.” They harvested fruits and vegetables from the farm for every episode; picked wild flowers from the side of a hill and made tea with them over an open fire. All the cooking was done over an open fire. Mom was an excellent cook, after years of practice. Dad hunted down and split firewood; theirs was a traditional marriage. They showed the process of planting, maintaining and harvesting their own food. They canned, baked bread, made cheese and yogurt, distilled lavender. And they found nearly 6 million subscribers, and over a million viewers of each video. Their channel is called Country Life Vlog. Some of their videos have 7 million views. As the money started to roll in, the pace picked up with a new video every day. I suspect that some professionals were hired to ‘help out’.
Youtube offers their ‘creators’ statistics on who’s watching and from where. The channel originally started with titles in their native Azerbaijani but it didn’t take long before English became the norm. And soon you noticed other small changes. There were new knives and utensils, pots and pans. Then a new building, and then another. Pretty soon the rural farmhouse with the animals on the ground floor and the living quarters upstairs was no longer part of the series. There were ten new structures of one sort or another, even an indoor kitchen with a refrigerator! They became celebrities, visited by officials from Middle East kingdoms.
Of course others saw the opportunity and started their own channels, with varying results. But one guy, also in Azerbaijan, gave it a try and succeeded. His first videos were an amateur effort but he learned. His channel “Wilderness Cooking” eventually took a lot of cues from Country Life; sweeping views of the mountains, funny little snippets of his animals; an aggressive goat, playing dogs, foraging ducks and chickens. He realized along the way that people were not looking for cooking videos but ‘slice of life’, for lack of a better term: Well produced views of how people lived in other places. He traded in his chef’s outfit for everyday wear, and started to produce better videos of rural life that included cooking. Here he is in one of his earliest videos before he settled on a more palatable style:
He also smartly answered one of the questions that viewers of Country Life always had: Who eats all that food? He invited the neighborhood children, mostly boys, to have lunch. They’re the kind of smiling, happy, well mannered, playful and hungry kids you used to see here, before we decided to shape every moment of our children’s lives in order to create the new and improved human being we thought the neighbors were creating.
It didn’t take long for the silliness to start. Aware and anxious that other channels popped up regularly, the competition for eyeballs intensified. They replaced the simple homespun videos that captured so many viewers with a quest for novelty and the videos became bizarre. I was sad to see the Country Life succumb to this madness when they made a clay ‘egg’ in order to cook a chicken and some potatoes:
It’s not worth the effort, obviously. And I wonder who talked them into this idea?
I once saw the comedian Alan King on a late night talk show where he complained about how novelty had taken over the American food scene with a quip about an “Armenian chef making sushi in a toilet bowl.” He was right, extraordinary novelty is what happens right before the collapse. In the not so distant past, the best restaurants had long, distinguished runs. Now, the best restaurants close within a couple of years. They bring brand new ideas to the market, but the fashionable crowd is also the most fickle, and often the cooking is so labor intensive that kitchen burn out takes its toll. You’re a fool to jump into the high end restaurant market today.
And on a personal note I can also attest to Mr. King’s own classic appetite. He often came into Le Cirque in New Your City, where I worked, on very busy Saturday evenings and ordered a whole Roast Chicken. It’s not as if we had one waiting for him, and his impatience was always annoying as hell. But if you order a roast chicken we were only going to do it correctly, or not at all.
Regardless of what you create in life, a restaurant, a Youtube channel, a substack, a human being, you will be tested from every angle, and mostly by your own character. How you respond to competition reveals your own inadequacies. If you run to join each new thing, always anxious about others in front of you, you’ll soon lose the thread of what you want to do and why you want to do it. Know what you’re about, set your sights and hold fast people, hold fast!