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

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If you cannot handle information purveyed to you in a dry, textbook-like manner this is not the book for you. He has worked alongside some of world's most innovative chefs, including Thomas Keller and Heston Blumenthal. At times, the book feels like a textbook that one would read for some sort of chemistry or cooking class, but I wouldn't say that the book as a whole is so dry as a typical textbook. Throughout the book you will come across many descriptions of the evolution of techniques and equipment, the reasons for using certain techniques, the evolution of food technology etc. This is the kind of book that will sit next to the stove, dog-eared and grease-spattered, eternally useful, until Personal Chef Robots become fixtures in all of our homes.

I am curious about the chemistry, preparation and anthropology of food and McGee has all of those bases covered. Did you know that the cell walls of mushrooms aren’t made up of cellulose, like plants, but rather of chitin, the carbohydrate-amine complex that makes up the outer skeletons of insects?

This new edition is the most complete book on food that I have ever seen, and it is easy to read-an inconceivable amount of information made incredibly accessible. The diagrams and tables are OK, but the publishers and printers have really let down the content here. For example, he describes buffalo milk as being barnyardy and reminiscent of mushrooms and freshly-cut grass. Your daft *****/******* of a wife/husband and you are trying to come to terms with the fact that only one of you will get to decide what to do with the Jerusalem Artichokes/ Lamb chops. Instead, there are entire pages of historical and scientific context, giving a complete picture of each topic being covered.

All homes could use a small shelf of reference books: the dictionary, an encyclopedia, a basic cookbook. In point of fact, if your going to get stranded on a desert island, take this along, IT COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE! 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.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.