McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture

Product Information

Classic book for the cook who wants to know a little bit more about the science of food and cooking.

Practical information, like how to tell stale eggs from fresh, is liberally sprinkled amid the science and anecdotes.The only thing I am not looking forward to is reaching the end of the book, so I have decided to read it a second and probably third time. I asked my brother (scientist and cook) to get me something like that for my birthday, and he sent this book. Plants as common as cabbage, lima beans, potatoes and lettuce have had some of their old wild, natural toxicity bred out of them. From Plato’s views on cooking to electron micrographs of cheese to a description of how eggs form in a chicken’s body to the history of beer and chocolate, this book offers an intoxicating wealth of food information, trivia, and science.

On Food and Cooking is one of those few books that I can drop on a table, let it fall open to any page, and read for the next hour. McGee's scientific approach to cooking has been embraced and popularized by chefs and authors such as Heston Blumenthal, David Chang, Alton Brown, Shirley Corriher, Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Russ Parsons. I have used Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking for the last two decades whenever I've had questions on the chemistry of food or to understand some aspect of the cooking process. The work is separated into sections that focus on the ingredients, providing the structure for the author to speculate on the history of foodstuffs and cookery, and the molecular characteristics of food flavors, [6] while the text is illustrated by charts, graphs, pictures, and sidebar boxes with quotes from sources such as Brillat-Savarin and Plutarch. If you DO work your way through from beginning to end, and are serious about cooking, this will improve every aspect of your cooking.This is definitely a reference book to be laid open on a table and lovingly dipped into by an enquiring mind. I have been reading about cooking, and experimenting since I was a child, I own too many cookbooks to easily confess, and this is finally a book which puts things in context, which makes me understand the science of why this or that, put into cultural and historical context. While that would certainly work to improve your technique when looking up a specific ingredient, you'd miss out on a lot. I believe it will remain my favourite book of all time (and I read a lot of reference books on many subjects). Interesting tidbits McGee's has taught me: raw pineapple will curdle milk, but cooked pineapple will not.

Among the major themes addressed throughout the new edition are: - Traditional and modern methods of food production and their influences on food quality - The great diversity of methods by which people in different places and times have prepared the same ingredients - Tips for selecting the best ingredients and preparing them successfully - The particular substances that give foods their flavors, and that give us pleasure - Our evolving knowledge of the health benefits and risks of foods On Food and Cooking is an invaluable and monumental compendium of basic information about ingredients, cooking methods, and the pleasures of eating. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

McGee on Food and Cookery is an expanded version of Harold McGee's classic exploration of science in the kitchen. It's 800 pages of all the tedious details about ingredients and cooking methods that you never wanted to know, and Harold McGee gets props for putting together these comprehensive tome. A must-have resource for any student of the stove, On Food and Cooking synthesizes details from a wide variety of scientific disciplines and gastronomic traditions, sparking the reader's culinary imagination with every turn of the page. Is is not about cooking, but about why and how cooking works, about where the flavor is in the spices and why the tomato ripens, what makes a sauce a sauce instead of gravy or soup, and what nougat really is. For example, he describes buffalo milk as being barnyardy and reminiscent of mushrooms and freshly-cut grass.