On Food and
Cooking: the Science and Lore of the Kitchen is a book by Harold McGee, published by Scribner in
the United States in 1984 and revised extensively for a 2004 second edition. It
is published by Hodder & Stoughton in Britain under the title McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of
Kitchen Science, History and Culture.
The book provides a reference to the
scientific understanding and preparation of food. It has been described by Alton
Brown as "the Rosetta stone of the culinary world", Daniel Boulud
has called the book a "must for every cook who possesses an
inquiring mind", while Heston Blumenthal has stated it is "the
book that has had the greatest single impact on my cooking".
The book is simply interesting to amateur
foodies and culinary professionals. This is the serendipity principle. If you
prospect in a rich land, you will invariably find something of value. The
`lore' in the subtitle is not an afterthought. The book includes history,
linguistics and cooking practice in addition to simple science. In over 800
pages of densely packed narrative, one will invariably find something of
interest, especially since the book covers such a broad range of topics,
including:
1) Milk and Dairy
2) Eggs
3) Meat
4) Fish and Shellfish
5) Fruits and Vegetables
6) Seeds, Cereals, and Doughs
7) Sauces
8) Sugars and Chocolate
9) Alcohol (Wine, Beer, and Distilled Spirits)
10) Cooking Methods
11) Cooking Utensil Materials
12) `The Four Basic Food Molecules'
13) Basic Chemistry
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 flavours, while the text is illustrated by charts, graphs, pictures, and
sidebar boxes with quotes from sources such as Brillat-Savarin and Plutarch.
The book advises on how to cook many things (e.g., for pasta use abundant water, avoid hard water, add salt and a
little oil to water, use slightly acidic water, with reasons and the science
behind everything, OFaC 2nd ed. p576) and includes a few historical recipes
(e.g., Fish or Meat Jelly, by Taillevent
in 1375, OFaC 2nd ed. p584), but no modern recipes as such.
You should be aware that this book is more
an encyclopedia than a recipe book or a collection of essays. If you're looking
for a fun discussion of food science, then Alton Brown's "I'm just here for the food" may be a
better choice. If you're looking for recipes that are optimized by principles
of food science, I'd recommend Shirley O. Corriher's "Cookwise." (Actually, I'd recommend both of those books anyway.) Some readers
may find "On Food and Cooking" a little bit too dense and technical
to read from cover to cover, but as a reference book, it's unmatched.
The second edition is a great improvement
over the first, and I'd strongly recommend it not only to new readers but to
anyone who read the first edition. (Just
the new section on fish makes this book worth purchasing.) This is really a
totally new book: it's been completely reorganized, new illustrations have been
added, and it's 66% longer than the old version. I'm guessing that the only
reason that this book has the same title is for marketing value: the first book
was very well known by cooks.
Want to learn
more? Read…
No comments:
Post a Comment