I love watching old men cook on YouTube. Perhaps the most popular guys of this genre are Marco Pierre White and Jacques Pépin. There’s a studied carelessness to the cooking that is entertaining and edifying. And I will confess: these men are aspirations. If I can cook and generally live like them when I reach their age, I think I’d be happy with how things turned out in between now and then.

The recipes are uninvolved and use ingredients that are easily available. The flavors are simple, the food is fatty and filling. The men cooking these recipes are slow to move but appear comfortable on camera. They talk to the camera like the audience is a single person standing by them in their home kitchen.

It’s a delight to watch these men be curmudgeons while handling food and cooking. They seem intent on not caring about decorum or, frankly, common sense in the kitchen. Some examples of this behavior:

• Sat down or poorly hunched over while cooking, though luckily everything they need is around them
• Dipping fingers into either dishes to taste for seasoning or hot pans to flip food
• Cutting or chopping stuff on a dinner plate or other surface, just not a board
• Using dinner tablespoons and forks instead of spatulas or similar utensils to move food around in hot pans

The videos convey that cooking their recipes are exercises in slow living. They are edited and produced in an understated way. The clips are short and to the point, the music isn’t louder than the dialogue and the cameras shoot from instructive angles. Those understated choices give them a timeless look and feel when other FoodTubers are churning out trendy content to chase second-screen users. It makes sense that the relaxed approach to cooking and the soft audio traits of this genre overlap with the broad Unintentional ASMR genre on YouTube.

Cooking the food featured in Old Man videos is a perfect way to while away an afternoon being fussy about a single meal for yourself and a patient partner. And yet despite the fussiness, there’s little to no romanticizing of the cooking process or the food. These men are there in the kitchen to do a job. No proclamations for the love of food, culture or nourishing people. No mentions of the Maillard reaction. No reminiscing about cooking with a dead relative. It’s just fucking cooking. White natters at the camera in places about Michelin stars and the restaurant business in the BBC videos I link below, but he’s also making a slow dish and probably needs to fill in dead air.

Here are some of my all-time favorite clips and old men, ordered by how often I revisit them:

• Antonio Carluccio making tiramisu while sitting down. I don’t eat pork but I still learned a lot from his pasta carbonara video
• Marco Pierre White making scrambled eggs for the BBC while whispering his beautiful, intense nonsense
• Jacques Pépin cooking pesto and making onion sandwiches. His whole series on the KQED channel is a great watch
• James May making British sandwiches from the 70s, like cold sandwiches with salad cream
• Alain Desgranges making chocolate mousse. At one point he yanks the KitchenAid blender at an angle for the overhead camera to get a better shot of the bowl, which is particularly delightful and curmudgeonly.
• Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh making a ham sandwich
• He’s not an old man at the time of recording this clip, but it fits the genre to watch Ainsley Harriot make a toasted sandwich in Jamaica