So-called celebrity chefs, e.g. Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay or Marcus Samuelsson, are the brand-faces for multimillion businesses including tv-programs, cookbooks and kitchen attire. Their publications and similar ones have had major influence on the public‘s relation to food and cooking during the last couple of years. The celebrity chef who most outspokenly appears not only as a cook, but as an educator, is Jamie Oliver (e.g. Tominc, 2012)⁠. This study is one of several upcoming studies on the pedagogy and didacicts of Jamie Oliver.

The aim of this paper is to scrutinize and discuss how the process of cooking is described and transformed into instructional and/or educational texts in a number of selected cookbooks published by Jamie Oliver. It furthermore aims at studying how the relationship between author (Jamie Oliver) as the teacher/master, and the reader, as the pupil/apprentice and their relationship towards ingredients and methods is constructed in these books.

As the choice of words up to here shows, the theoretical basis of this study are rooted in concepts of schooling (e.g. teacher/pupil) and vocational training or apprenticeship. How the different works of Jamie Oliver simulate different forms of teaching and learning is one central question of this study. 

The cookbook texts and recipes studied here are selected to be representative of the different genres of cookbooks that are part of the Jamie Oliver‘s publication list. A critical hermeneutic approach is used in order to analyze and discuss the chosen texts both in regard of their social-historical context, as well their form and content in relation to different, communicative aspects of teaching and learning (cf. Luhmann, 2002; Wenger, 1998).

Some supposed findings of the study are that the cookbooks contain aspects of instruction, training and education, depending on the purpose of the respective publications. This supposedly will also relate to different kinds of constructed relationships between the author and the reader.