On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen

This red `On Food and Cooking, The Science and Lore of the Kitchen' by Harold McGee is a new edition of what is the most widely quoted culinary work in English. It may be almost as influential on the thinking of culinary professionals as Julia Child's `Mastering the Art of French Cooking' was on attitudes of American home cooking. The testimonials from the likes of Thomas Keller, Paula Wolfert, Jacques Pepin, and Rose Levy Beranbaum just begins to tell you how important McGee's volume has become. I was immensely pleased to see the exchange of acknowledgments between McGee and Keller to see how much the academic can learn from the professional chef. I can devote my thousand words on how good this book has been to the culinary world, but most of you already know that. What I will do is to list all the reasons one may wish to read this book. First, 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: Milk and Dairy Eggs Meat Fish and Shellfish Fruits and Vegetables Seeds, Cereals, and Doughs Sauces Sugars and Chocolate Alcohol (Wine, Beer, and Distilled Spirits) Cooking Methods Cooking Utensil Materials `The Four Basic Food Molecules' Basic Chemistry This is the perfect book in which to jump around to those subjects that interest you. I just wish the author would have put the last two subjects first so that more readers would stumble across them to gain a better understanding of what appears in the chapters on specific foods. A quick example of how this would help in practical terms is that the characteristics of alcohol, which stand halfway between water and oils explains why vodka is such a great flavor enhancing addition to pasta sauces. Second, professional and amateur bakers should read all of the chapters on grains, doughs, chocolate, alcohol, basic molecules, and the chemistry primer, as this is the one area of culinary practice where knowledge of science can make the biggest difference between good and great results. Both Shirley Corriher and Alton Brown have books which include baking science and Rose Levy Beranbaum's books all cover practical baking science in depth, but McGee puts all of this is a broader context which, to use Alton Brown's great metaphor about science and cooking, gives a roadmap covering a much broader area, to a finer scale of detail. Third, all culinary professionals who have anything whatsoever to do with teaching should read this book from cover to cover, twice. There is absolutely nothing more annoying than having a person in the role of teacher make a patently false statement in their area of expertise. The number of times a Food Network culinary celeb misuses the term `dissolve' when they really mean `emulsify' or simply `mix' would fill volumes. It is still a common mistake to say that searing protein seals in juices. There are many good reasons for searing. Preventing the escape of liquid is not one of them. Even Brown himself has made some gaffs in print and on `Good Eats' such as when he described a very corrosive compound as a strong acid rather than a strong base. He confused one end of the pH scale with the other. Fourth, anyone who has ambitions to develop their own recipes should read those chapters which deal with the major foods such as dairy, meats, fish, fruits, and vegetables, with a premium on the material on milk and eggs. Two defining characteristics of science are that it explains things and it predicts things. Most people understand the first but may not appreciate the second. One can predict, for example, that if you use too little fat in a milk or cream based gratin, the dairy will curdle, so, if you are playing around with your favorite mac and cheese recipe, do not be so quick to reach for that skim milk, as you are likely to be very disappointed with the result. Similarly, if you crave some Saturday morning buttermilk biscuits and the nearest carton of buttermilk is a 30 minute drive away, AND, you have no vinegar, AND you have no citrus, there is just a chance that your aging cream of tartar dissolved in milk will save the day, since this is an acidic salt which will stand in for the acidity in the buttermilk. As a former professional chemist, I can assure you that pure inorganic salts like cream of tartar simply do not go bad. I would have loved to hear the exchanges between author McGee and Thomas Keller, as Keller is probably the contemporary epitome of how the culinary professional uses experimental techniques in cooking. The constant tasting which every cook does is nothing more than a practical application of the chemical technique of titration, where materials are combined slowly until the desired result is achieved. What separates good from great cooks is using this technique to test raw materials. This is the truest marriage of science and cooking, following the maxim of Daniel Boulud who stated that to be really great, the journeyman cook must repeat the same procedure thousands of times to the point where the result is utterly reproducible and the cook can detect the desired endpoint easily by eye, nose, and mouth. Sounds like science to me. The author's introduction presents an excellent case for rereading the book in its second edition as he cites the great changes in food culture over the last twenty years. This is also a great case for anyone who is interested in any aspect of food. A very important book indeed.

I bought this book as a birthday present for my husband, a former chemist and sometimes gourmet cook. He had enjoyed the original version of this book and also liked the Curious Cook. I heard that the revised edition was significantly updated, so I got it for him right away. I figured that he would periodically read chapters on his own. Here is what surprised me: It has become the bedtime story book for our almost 10 year old son. I knew that my husband would like it, so I excitedly showed it to my youngest son. He perusing it himself. Of course he did not understand much of it without lengthy explanations. So my husband started to read it to him, explaining the obscure parts. I thought that my son would get bored after a couple of nights of this, but they have been at it for quite a while and my son has not asked to switch books. The author covers a wide variety of types of foods and food issues. It starts with seections based on food types. Milk and milk products are the first. Once you read about the chemical, physical and aesthetic properties of a food, you want to go out and try the foods or food combinations yourself. The revised edition is significantly different from the original. If you are the type of person who likes the science behind food, you will probably also be the type who cares whether your information is up to date. If you are more of a chemistry dilettante like me, you will appreciate the interesting writing style and the relevance to current cooking and nutrition issues. If you are a science-oriented 10 year old, you will enjoy telling your classmates and teachers lurid details about what they are currently chewing. Since you can cloak these lurid details in legitimate basic science, the teachers generally have to let you keep talking. This book explains the "why" of the way ingredients mix together to make a tasty or unpalatable food. While this is not a recipe cookbook, the author does provide valuable information on how to choose and store foods to ensure the best quality. Understanding the basic principles of food chemistry enables a cook to improvise and sometimes sustitute ingredients. It explains how the different constitutents of milk influence the milk's properties. This in turn helps explain how we arrive at different properties of cheeses. the author takes you from the overall look of the food down to the molecular level. The book helps one understand food safety and spoilage. Advances in our understanding of food safety are reflected in this book. In sum, I recommend this book for erudite cooks and chemists, as well as diletanttes (like me) who want to know more about selected foods. I would not recommend this as bedtime reading for most 10 year olds, but for a certain subset--the type of kid who is always asking "why" it might be a good source of answers. (And yes, I read him regular books when it is my turn to do bedtime stories.)

Great book. Well written and informative. Recommended.

McGee has packed into this encyclopedic book more useful and truly valuable information than you can imagine. If you truly want to understand the ingredients you use, and to use them far better, this book will show you all you need, and entertain you at the same time. The first addition was invaluable. This one is the next level up!

This book does more than any other I'm aware of to bring cooking out of the traditionalist confines of practice, and to free it with science. In the process, it manages to confirm tradition and practice, and to frequently shed new light on old methods. Cooking schools and cookbooks, with few exceptions, have always relied upon simple, prescriptive instructions without explanations. Students are told to add a roux to demi-glace to create a clasic brown sauce, but aren't informed of the chemistry that makes the sauce thick and silky. Mr. McGee provides the explanation, in lucid, perfectly informative text, with enough detail to satisfy the nerds, and with enough enthusiasm to keep the casual cook entertained. And more serious cooks will understand the science and use it as a springboard to improvements and new improvisation. The spirit of the new cuisine, as propounded by El Bulli and the like, with its radical rethinking of food as chemistry, is possible only because McGee and others have organized and explained the facts behind the ingredients. But, for those of you who prefer a good old-fashioned bistro supper to foamed winter savory over a gel of seawater, McGee's book will be a revelation and an entertainment. If you read and understand the science of browning meat, you will get better at it. But you will also find yourself jumping from the meat-browning explanation to a treatise on protein, which will lead you to the chemistry of sauces, which will pique your interest in glaces and reductions, which will lead you to... If you tend to browse in dictionaries and encyclopedias, this book is for you. And if you're skeptical of the simplifications of cookbooks, or confused by their oft-conflicting advice, you will begin turning to this book to disentangle the traditions and complement your knowledge. I use it for menu planning, recipe refinement, helping my daughter with her school report on fast foods and saturated fats, and staying awake in the bathtub. I've also used it to settle a bet [I won a bottle of E. Guigal White Hermitage 1998] and to correct an error in the Larousse Gastronomique [something tremendously important to do with heating foie gras]. I believe that most cooks would benefit greatly from relying more on reference books and less on recipe books. And of all my food reference books, this one has been the most enlightening.

As other reviewers have pointed-out, this is a huge text, packed dense with lots of in-depth and detailed information. It is definitely a challenge to truly understand the organization of the book, and how to get into it. It does seem daunting, at least at first. Once you start to dive-in, however, the information starts to seem quite approachable. What you realize is that you can more or less simply start into a section that contains a topic of interest, and get something out of it. You don't need to necessarily be systematic in studying as you would with a textbook. For my desires, this book is very close to what I wanted: something that would present information beyond a regular "cookbook" or even a "how-to" guide to technique. Recipes rarely teach me much about cooking fundamentals, and how-to guides don't usually give much information on "why" you do it this way and not that. For me, wanting to actually get good at creating my own dishes, this book provides the sort of more theoretical knowledge I need. What I'm beginning to realize is just how much knowledge one needs to get their head around, to be a really solid, creative cook. A book such as this is necessarily going to be massive and dense, if it's going to be anywhere near complete. Otherwise it would just be another superficial guide. I do think the book could benefit from a bit of reorganization, to some extent. I think it would be nice to have it split up into at least a couple volumes, with perhaps an accompanying small volume just to guide the reader through the information and how to use it. That said, though -- again -- honestly just dive into it, anywhere, and read sections that are of interest.

You know who you are. It's not enough that you know 'how'. If you love something enough to understand the how, you have to know the 'why' and maybe even the 'who' and the 'where' and 'when'. This is the book for you. There are a few books in my life that I really treasure because they unlocked secrets. Of course, I'm not curious about everything, there are some secrets that are more special than others. Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking is a book that looks behind the chemical scenes at one of my favorite activities. This is the book that showed me how the structure of a gluten molecule accounted for the strange elasticity of bread dough. It taught me what goes on when fruit ripens and meat browns: why there's no dark meat on fish and how a meringue forms. I was delighted when I read this book and I keep a copy on my desk now, going back to it for answers to questions and just for fun. This is not a book of recipes, but it's the perfect first stop for someone who wants to make their own recipe. It is loaded with the history and culture of food. The best thing about this book is that for lovers of food and cooking it offers something more than mere knowledge-it offers a sense of sharing in its secrets, a sense of intimacy with the subject, And for true lovers, isn't intimacy the best thing of all?

This is a truly unique and wonderful book. It contains a tremendous amount of information about the food we eat. It shows the structure and composition of animals, plants, eggs, liquids, and seeds, explaining why each one has certain characteristics (for example, it turns out that the smell of fish comes from the decomponsition of a chemical in ocean fish cells that maintains the proper pressure balance with salt water). It explains what happpens when ingredients are chopped, mixed, heated, cooled, fermented, or otherwise transformed. I discovered the first edition about five years ago, and it permanently changed how I think about food and how I cook. Since then, I've seen many other chefs mention this book. For example, in Michael Ruhlman's book "The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute," CIA students often study this (unrequired) book to better understand what they're doing. You should be aware that this book is more an encypclopedia than an 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.