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

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The basic flavor of fresh milk is affected by the animals' feed. Dry hay and silage are relatively poor in fat and protein and produce a less complicated, mildly cheesy aroma, while lush pasturage provides raw material for sweet, raspberry-like notes (derivatives of unsaturated long-chain fatty acids), as well as barnyardy indoles. For its twentieth anniversary, Harold McGee prepared a new, fully revised and updated edition of On Food and Cooking . He has rewritten the text almost completely, expanded it by two-thirds, and commissioned more than 100 new illustrations. As compulsively readable and engaging as ever, the new On Food and Cooking provides countless eye-opening insights into food, its preparation, and its enjoyment. Until industrial times, dairying was done on the farm, and in many countries mainly by women, who milked the animals in early morning and after noon and then worked for hours to churn butter or make cheese. Country people could enjoy good fresh milk, but in the cities, with confined cattle fed inadequately on spent brewers' grain, most people saw only watered-down, adulterated, contaminated milk hauled in open containers through the streets. Tainted milk was a major cause of child mortality in early Victorian times. Harold McGee is the author of several books on the chemistry and history of food. He also writes a regular column debunking kitchen myths for The New York Times.

As I finished, I realized that cooks more serious than my friends and I might be skeptical about the relevance of cells and molecules to their craft. So I spent much of the introduction trying to bolster my case. I began by quoting an unlikely trio of authorities, Plato, Samuel Johnson, and Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, all of whom suggested that cooking deserves detailed and serious study. I pointed out that a 19th-century German chemist still influences how many people think about cooking meat, and that around the turn of the 20th century, Fannie Farmer began her cookbook with what she called "condensed scientific knowledge" about ingredients. I noted a couple of errors in modern cookbooks by Madeleine Kamman and Julia Child, who were ahead of their time in taking chemistry seriously. And I proposed that science can make cooking more interesting by connecting it with the basic workings of the natural world. Twenty years ago the worlds of science and cooking were neatly compartmentalized. There were the basic sciences, physics and chemistry and biology, delving deep into the nature of matter and life. There was food science, an applied science mainly concerned with understanding the materials and processes of industrial manufacturing. And there was the world of small-scale home and restaurant cooking, traditional crafts that had never attracted much scientific attention. Nor did they really need any. Cooks had been developing their own body of practical knowledge for thousands of years, and had plenty of reliable recipes to work with. Fish now gets a chapter all of its own and the catalogues of vegetables, fruits, plants and seeds are all very much longer and more complete, if only to bring in those things that were not staple items of trade in 1984 when we knew nothing of canola oil, nor were we much interested in extra-virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar or well-tempered chocolate. Greater length is also needed to cover processes in more depth, bread baking among them. And the area where most progress has been made in modern cooking -the construction of sauces and allied forms - is allocated double the space of the first edition. You are a little opinionated, and I have had some trouble in making you understand that the phenomena which take place in your laboratory are nothing other than the execution of the eternal laws of nature, and that certain things which you do without thinking, and only because you have seen others do them, derive nonetheless from the highest scientific principles. The Mediterranean world of Greece and Rome used economical olive oil rather than butter, but esteemed cheese. The Roman Pliny praised cheeses from distant provinces that are now parts of France and Switzerland. And indeed cheese making reached its zenith in continental and northern Europe, thanks to abundant pastureland ideal for cattle, and a temperate climate that allowed long, gradual fermentations.

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Technical innovation has radical consequences on how and what we eat. In the 17th century, cooks discovered that beating egg whites in copper bowls gave body and volume to exciting new foams which they could set as meringues and soufflés. Not much earlier, a very bright cook worked out how to replace a sheep's stomach with a floured cloth for boiling puddings - hello hasty pudding, Christmas pudding, Sussex pond pudding and that entire British repertoire of merry stodge. And a few years later, Denys Papin demonstrated the "digester" or proto-pressure cooker, turning bones to pap in hours. These were big steps, and their like may be multiplied all the way to the microwave and the mechanical blender, but it's not exactly the men-in-white-coats image we now have of kitchen science. Milk has been especially valued for two nutritional characteristics: its richness in calcium, and both the quantity and quality of its protein. Recent research has raised some fascinating questions about each of these.

Coping with Lactose Intolerance Fortunately, lactose intolerance is not the same as milk intolerance. Lactase-less adults can consume about a cup/250 ml of milk per day without severe symptoms, and even more of other dairy products. Cheese contains little or no lactose (most of it is drawn off in the whey, and what little remains in the curd is fermented by bacteria and molds). The bacteria in yogurt generate lactose-digesting enzymes that remain active in the human small intestine and work for us there. And lactose-intolerant milk fans can now buy the lactose-digesting enzyme itself in liquid form (it's manufactured from a fungus, Aspergillus), and add a few drops to any dairy product just before they consume it. No wonder that milk captured the imaginations of many cultures. The ancient Indo-Europeans were cattle herders who moved out from the Caucasian steppes to settle vast areas of Eurasia around 3000 BCE; and milk and butter are prominent in the creation myths of their descendents, from India to Scandinavia. Peoples of the Mediterranean and Middle East relied on the oil of their olive tree rather than butter, but milk and cheese still figure in the Old Testament as symbols of abundance and creation.

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a b McGee, Harold (2004). On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. New York, New York: Scribner. ISBN 978-0-684-80001-1. LCCN 2004058999. OCLC 56590708. Once upon a time, I was expressing my frustration with books on cooking to a chemist friend -- primarily that most books on cooking treat cooking as this magical art. They presume lots of knowledge on the part of the reader and they give directions that theoretically make the food what it's supposed to be, rarely explaining WHY you want to cook this meat at temperature x or mince this thing instead of slice, or whatever. I wanted something that answered a bit more of the Why? As science has gradually percolated into the world of cooking, cooking has been drawn into academic and industrial science. One effective and charming force behind this movement was Nicholas Kurti, a physicist and food lover at the University of Oxford, who lamented in 1969: "I think it is a sad reflection on our civilization that while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus, we do not know what goes on inside our soufflés." In 1992, at the age of 84, Nicholas nudged civilization along by organizing an International Workshop on Molecular and Physical Gastronomy at Erice, Sicily, where for the first time professional cooks, basic scientists from universities, and food scientists from industry worked together to advance gastronomy, the making and appreciation of foods of the highest quality. In semitropical India, most zebu and buffalo milk was allowed to sour overnight into a yogurt, then churned to yield buttermilk and butter, which when clarified into ghee (p. 37) would keep for months. Some milk was repeatedly boiled to keep it sweet, and then preserved not with salt, but by the combination of sugar and long, dehydrating cooking (see box, p. 26). I don't think that Harold McGee missed a single detail in this absolutely fascinating anthology of the hows, whys, and wherefores of cooking. This book is a treasure trove of useful facts and unusual information and a must for every cook who possesses an inquiring mind." —Daniel Boulud

Fresh milk, cream, and butter may not be as prominent in European and American cooking as they once were, but they are still essential ingredients. Milk has bubbled up to new prominence atop the coffee craze of the 1980s and '90s.Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking is a kitchen classic. Hailed by Time magazine as "a minor masterpiece" when it first appeared in 1984, On Food and Cooking is the bible to which food lovers and professional chefs worldwide turn for an understanding of where our foods come from, what exactly they're made of, and how cooking transforms them into something new and delicious. Now, for its twentieth anniversary, Harold McGee has prepared a new, fully revised and updated edition of On Food and Cooking. He has rewritten the text almost completely, expanded it by two-thirds, and commissioned more than 100 new illustrations. As compulsively readable and engaging as ever, the new On Food and Cooking provides countless eye-opening insights into food, its preparation, and its enjoyment. I know of no chef worth his salt who doesn't keep a copy of Harold McGee's masterwork, On Food and Cooking... it is the Rosetta stone of the culinary world...McGee flipped on the science switch, and suddenly there was light. Whereas Julia Child taught how, McGee explains 'why.'" —Alton Brown, Time The most startling revelation is that McGee cooks his vegetables in a microwave, because it turns out to be better for retaining their vitamins than steaming or boiling, thanks to the swiftness with which it kills enzymes that degrade the veg. He is critical of the organic movement. When organic lobby groups in the US put out a report saying it had been proven that organic food delivered more nutrients than non-organic, McGee looked into it and wasn't impressed. On Food and Cooking is a unique blend of culinary lore and scientific explanation that examines food -- its history, its make-up, and its behavior when we cook it, cool it, dice it, age it, or otherwise prepare it for eating. Generously spiced with historical and literary anecdote, it covers all the major food categories, from meat and potatoes to sauce béarnaise and champagne. Easy-to-understand scientific explanations throw light on such mysteries as why you can whip cream but not milk what makes white meat white whether searing really seals in flavor how to tell stale eggs from fresh why "fruits" ripen and "vegetables" don't how to save a sauce what hops do and what happens when you knead dough. A chapter on nutrition reveals that Americans have been obsessed with their diet since the 1800s and exposes the fallacies behind food fads past and present. There's a section on additives -- a not-so-new addition to food -- and taste and smell, our two pleasure-giving versions of the oldest sense on earth. With more than 200 illustrations, including extraordinary photographs of food taken through the electron microscope, this book will delight and fascinate anyone who has ever cooked, savored, or wondered about food"--Publisher description 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.

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.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. Milk owes its milky opalescence to microscopic fat globules and protein bundles, which are just large enough to deflect light rays as they pass through the liquid. Dissolved salts and milk sugar, vitamins, other proteins, and traces of many other compounds also swim in the water that accounts for the bulk of the fluid. The sugar, fat, and proteins are by far the most important components, and we'll look at them in detail in a moment. A kitchen classic for over 35 years, and hailed by Time magazine as "a minor masterpiece" when it first appeared in 1984, On Food and Cooking is the bible which food lovers and professional chefs worldwide turn to for an understanding of where our foods come from, what exactly they're made of, and how cooking transforms them into something new and delicious.