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| On Food and Cooking | 
 enlarge | Author: Harold Mcgee
Publisher: Scribner
Category: Book
List Price: $22.00
Buy Used: $9.24
You Save: $12.76 (58%)
Used (39) Collectible (1) from $9.24
Avg. Customer Rating:  173 reviews
Sales Rank: 299250
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 704
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.7
ISBN: 0684843285
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.5
EAN: 9780684843285
ASIN: 0684843285
Publication Date: February 1, 1997
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Paperback, mark on outside of pages adjacent to spine, pages are tanning, nice copy. Ships promptly w/notification emailed after shipping.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Not for the dabbler February 18, 2007
33 out of 40 found this review helpful
This is an exhaustive, technical dense treatise on the chemistry and physics of cooking. It is pretty readable and quite well suited for an academic approach. I bought it thinking it to be something closer to a lengthy, general purpose magazine article on how food changes in preparation and found myself with more than I'd bargained for. It is a fine representation of what it is, but too specific and lengthy for a casual reader such as myself. For the serious chef or chemistry student, tho, it cannot be faulted.
The Foodie's Bible, Colorful and Endlessly Fascinating December 11, 2004
32 out of 33 found this review helpful
Food lovers can rest easy now that Harold McGee has updated his eminently readable 1984 tome, "On Food and Cooking". He is the literary counterpart to the Food Network's Alton Brown in providing an amalgam of history, science, literature, and cooking tips, spreading his knowledge across fifteen chapters, each devoted to a different food category. McGee leaves no food unturned. He starts rather appropriately with milk and dairy products, life-starting foods, and goes through edible plants, cereals, doughs and batters, wine and beer and distilled spirits, even basic food molecules. This is no dry scientific book, as McGee is a wonderfully colorful writer, lucid and endlessly fascinating.
McGee is truly a Renaissance man when it comes to food, and the book is packed with historical facts, literary anecdotes, and food legends passed down through the ages. For instance, when he talks about dairy products in the first chapter, he also brings up the domestication of the goat, the development of Parmesan, the history of ice cream and the best way to clarify butter. But his writing style is never contrived or pedantic and never gets in the way of the intriguing facts he brings to light. There are great illustrations and almost like a textbook, replete with easy-to-follow charts, graphs, and pictures, On the sidebars of each page, McGee shares insights from the likes of Brillat-Savarin, Plutarch and their culinary brethren along with ancient recipes for ash-roasted eggs, stuffed bonito with pennyroyal, and other delicacies. However, his focus is not purely historical, as he examines with great acuity, modern food production, current health risks and an easy-to-understand lesson on atoms, molecules, and the nature of energy. Rest assured that cooking basics are covered thoroughly. Would-be bakers can know what to expect with flour and why it behaves the way it does. Carnivores will discover what makes a tender stew or why it's such a delicate art to roast the perfect turkey. Even the seemingly trivial jumps off the page, for example, the fact that completely different cultures can produce such similar foods like kimchi and sauerkraut. Or one can realize that it takes 70,000 crocus flowers and 200 hours of labor to produce one pound of saffron. Only with this detail can one appreciate the exorbitant cost when you see it in the supermarket.
It's as if McGee has taken David Macaulay's wonderful book, "The Way Things Work", traded machinery for sustenance and mixed it all in a food processor to come up with an essential reference book one can read with pleasure and for education concurrently. Strongly recommended even for the non-food lover if such a creature exists.
Nonpareil food reference December 15, 2004
32 out of 34 found this review helpful
McGee is the doyen of kitchen chemistry. As proof, look at the blurbs on the back cover from such as Kerrer, Kamman, Boulud, Corriher, and other culinary luminaries. I have been using the first edition for twenty years; this one is much more complete and incorporates much food science discovered in the last two decades. You can use it as reference, but since I got it I have just been reading it like a novel, except that you don't have to read it in any order. Despite being an accomplished amateur cook, I found myself repeatedly exclaiming "So that's why......!" as I perused the various chapters. The last two chapters, an introduction to chemistry and primers to the fours major food substances (water, lipids, carbohydrates, and proteins) is the very best brief written summary of these topics I have ever seen.
I could exhaust my thesaurus finding synonyms for "paragon" to describe this book, but just buy it, read it, and enjoy it.
Deep knowledge...too deep. July 17, 2002
28 out of 34 found this review helpful
I enjoy cooking. I like science. I wanted to introduce the two. After reading "the making of a chef" (Ruhlman) where McGee's book is one of the 3 bibles, I had to get it. I read for about a week, got to page 100-something, and got a bit tired of it. I'm no idiot, and my knowledge in chemistry is pretty good, but sometimes the book would just bore me abit. A bit too much science and too little of how the science affects the cooking. I would want more of "why the thick crust bread is thick" and "beat your egg-whites with a cold beater" (cooking science tips) and less molecule explanations.
What does a chemistry PhD read his to kid at bedtime. February 12, 2005
27 out of 28 found this review helpful
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.)
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