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

When I want to understand the muscle fiber structure of octopus, or learn about the history and definition of pumpernickel bread, or figure out how the qualities of corn syrup differ from that of honey, I turn to Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking. This is an impressively extensive reference book of ingredients, cooking techniques, food history, and food science. The information is grouped in chapters such as Milk and Dairy Products, Meat, and Edible Plants, with a nice chemistry primer covering atoms, molecules and energy at the end. A staggering amount of information is packed into each chapter ranging from interesting facts, history and detailed descriptions to excellent illustrations.

McGee dedicates 68 pages to eggs, covering such show more topics as how a hen makes an egg, why yolks sometimes turn green when cooked, the eight different proteins that make up an egg white along with their natural function and culinary properties (did you know ovalbumin is 54% of the total protein in albumen and it sets when heated to 180˚F?), plus, a silly cook's joke about cooking eggs on a spit from book printed in the 1400s, and fourteen pages on egg foams. Whew! If you have any tendencies toward research, you will be lost in the pages from the moment you open the cover. show less

It is not a cookbook, but rather the context for all cookbooks: a stupendous compendium of how food -- every type of food -- works. It is heavy on chemistry (and its closing pages are a chemistry primer I wish I'd had in high school; read this first), but also patient explanations that a layperson / foodie will like: What is emulsification? Why do so many foods turn brown on exposure to air? How does the Maillard reaction work, and why is it the greatest thing to hit the culinary art since well before sliced bread? This is a reference book to be consulted often -- but I read it cover to cover, and enjoyed it lots.

I like to think that, while I don't know everything, I do know where to look it up. And this book is where I turn to most often: it tells me which fruit ripen faster in a paper bag (thank you, ethylene!), whether or not to refrigerate apples (wisdom which is trumped by my wife's preference), and what the bubbles in bread dough come from (in language, with pictures, that even my kids understand).

Advances in the state of the art may render some of the information out of date, but it will be a long time before it's all put together between two covers that make me want to throw out my McGee.

Not a cookbook. Everything you ever might want to know about how food works. How ice cream is made, why bread rises, what kind of molds are in cheese, what are the parts of an egg. And yet, readable. Brill. May however, make you annoy your friends with "well you know, cheese on the Asian steppe in the late Iron Age..."

Title pretty much says it all. McGee gives you some very digestible tidbits of food science while also telling you the history & tradition of the foods and techniques he's covering. Far from exhaustive, but not meant to be. It is fairly comprehensive, though. McGee wisely breaks the text down into small sections and gives you the skinny on a huge range of food-related topics in deft, literate prose. There's also a solid. fifteen-page bibliography for those who do go in for exhaustive knowledge on any of the topics he treats. This is a food book for folks that love food but not necessarily food books. It gives you a quick and pleasant way to satiate and stimulate your curiosity about practically any food topic.

A really excellent look at the underlying physical phenomena that go on in the process of cooking; this is one of Alton Brown’s top references. McGee covers the physics and chemistry at a level that should be easy for anyone who made it through high school AP Chemistry and accessible to anyone who finds Scientific American readable. In addition to the science, he also includes interesting vignettes of history and etymology, including excerpts from historical cookbooks.

I don’t do a lot of cooking (yet), but in my limited areas of experience, there were some good a-ha moments. This would be a good book to keep on hand to reference any time you work with a particular ingredient or technique to deepen your understanding and suggest new show more possibilities. It would also be a good book for any high school chemistry teacher to keep on hand to interest a student who knows more about cooking, or to make cooking more interesting for a science type. show less

Ever wonder if copper bowls *really* make a difference when whipping egg whites? McGee includes both protein folding theory and spectrophotometer evidence. No shortage of electron microscope photographs either - but it's not *just* hardcore science geekery, he takes you through history and real science (repeatable experiments!)