After browsing the eGullet forums, I found a post entitled “Cooking with Dog” and that simply demanded checking into. Of course, it doesn’t involve cooking dog meat, but instead features a Japanese woman cooking next to a grey poodle named Francis. The cooking instruction videos are for traditional Japanese dishes and there is narration in English along with subtitles.
The dishes are rather simple and inspiring, especially if you haven’t cooked Japanese food before. The videos can also be pretty funny at points. There is just something about a dog dutifully sitting next to a cook and staring into the camera that builds an expectation of humor. You kind of wait for the dog to be a dog, and every now and then the poodle host will get distracted when a fish or something else that smells good comes along.
Anyhow, it is definitely worth checking out the videos, and with all the celebrity chefs these days, it is a nice change of pace to have a dog ‘cook’ — even if only as a mascot.
You can find these videos on YouTube at the Cooking With Dog channel.
