On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee

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

• 
  Elizabeth

  This book is endlessly fascinating. Interesting tidbits McGee's has taught me: raw pineapple will curdle milk, but cooked pineapple will not. Some of our fellow humans will be repulsed by cheese because of an instinctual reaction to fermented foods. See? Fascinating!
  
  McGee's contains necessary information that you can not get from a recipe on practically every dish and ingredient known to man. 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.
• 
  David

  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?
  
  This friend suggested that I hunt down something on the topic that approached things from a scientific perspective, and while looking I stumbled upon McGee. It's certainly less front-to-back readable than I would have liked, and more encyclopediac. And while it has not exactly unlocked the black art of cooking for me, it's a great resource book to have in the kitchen. Any time I'm using a technique or ingredient I haven't used before, I consult Good Harry McGee. And it's a pretty well-written and researched book too (with lots of great historical context), and as such, it's fun to pick up and read random sections from, on occasion.
• 
  Cynthia

  Before there was Alton Brown, there was Harold McGee. This is a smart, dazzling, fabulously eclectic collection of information about what we eat. From Plato’s views on cooking to electron micrographs of cheese to a description of how eggs form in a chicken’s body to the history of beer and chocolate, this book offers an intoxicating wealth of food information, trivia, and science. 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? Or that raw lima beans contain sugar-cyanide complexes that can shut down your respiratory system? Or that a strawberry is a “false” fruit? If you want to know which vegetables were available at the court of Richard II, why fish is white, or the chemical composition of a saturated fat, then this is the book for you. Practical information, like how to tell stale eggs from fresh, is liberally sprinkled amid the science and anecdotes. Even if you don’t cook and only rarely eat, this is a fascinating book.
• 
  ^

  The 2nd edition. Concentrated knowledge; yet NOT written in impenetrable ‘academicalese.’ McGee's ability to amass, sort, analyse, and order an enormous amount of relevant information is awesomely impressive. He makes the average PhD. thesis look sheepish.
  
  This is definitely a reference book to be laid open on a table and lovingly dipped into by an enquiring mind. Not held open in the hands: too heavy. However, I’ll keep my (much smaller) copy of the 1st edition, because I want to follow how McGee’s thinking has modified and changed over the twenty years between 1984 and 2004.
  
  Every school library ought to have a copy on their shelves. How better to turn children onto the joys of science than a book on ‘edible science’?
  
• 
  carol.

  This will take me forever to read, which is why I purchased on kindle. On the advice of friends, I started at the back, with the basic science. It 100% passes the science sniff test.
• 
  Matthew Iden

  On Food and Cooking is one of those few books that I can drop on a table, let it fall open to any page, and read for the next hour.
  
  As I said to someone once: you may not cook, but you probably eat. If so, this book should keep you entranced. Nearly anything you might want to know about the history, etymology, and process of gastronomy is covered in this volume, but even that is too dry a description to really explain how fun it is.
  
  Want to know why there are so many Sugar Loaf mountains around the U.S. countryside? That's how sugar used to be sold. Did you know part of the cashew is poisonous and the other can be made into beer? Want to read a description of all the kinds of distillation there are? Or how the science of nutrition was founded and where it may have gone wrong?
  
  All homes could use a small shelf of reference books: the dictionary, an encyclopedia, a basic cookbook. But right next to all of them should be On Food and Cooking.
• 
  John Burke

  This is an invaluable resource when your kids ask "does THIS cheese have mold in it" or "why does it all stick together if you cook it too long" or when you want to know what makes espresso different from coffee. 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. The style is accessible but unafraid of chemistry. A wonderful companion to the cookbooks you read for recipes.
• 
  Hirondelle

  I think I am going to be currently reading this for a very very long time. It´s 800 pages, small print, massive index (essential) and bibliography. Human imagination and cultural complexity regarding food being as it is, not even 800 pages will be enough, so I don´t think it has EVERYTHING on food but it does have practically everything of the most common kind, in a wide global way.
  
  First thing - this is not a recipe book and it is a pretty serious book. You can use it as dictionary, using the very good index to browse and learn snippets at will. Reading a chapter from beginning to end takes its time and it is incredibly rewarding. I have been reading about cooking, and experimenting since I was a child, I own too many cookbooks to easily confess, and this is finally a book which puts things in context, which makes me understand the science of why this or that, put into cultural and historical context. For example did you know about differences between american and european flour?
  
  Maybe the most useful and interesting book on food I have yet found.
• 
  Nick Black

  At $25, it's rather more palatable (pun intended!) than
  Modernist Cuisine's $675, and was referenced in the same New Yorker article. According to GnuCash, I spent more money last year on cigarettes than groceries; changing that seems a noble enough objective. I'll likely start by stocking pepper.
  
  btw, wenger, i dig your taking up of my "*-acquire*" bookshelf semantics!
• 
  Monica Lauer

  Being a total food nerd, this book was heaven for me. I am curious about the chemistry, preparation and anthropology of food and McGee has all of those bases covered. If you cannot handle information purveyed to you in a dry, textbook-like manner this is not the book for you. However if you want to know everything there is to know about eggs, milk, herbs, veggies, meat and more and why they all work together so well (or don't) you definitely need to pick this one up!
  
• 
  Scott Erickson

  This is a truly epic book. It covers food from every relevant angle: gastronomically, biologically, chemically, historically, culturally. It's exhaustive and, as a result, can be exhausting sometimes. It took a month of fairly regular reading to finish, and I skipped some parts. But if you read this book from cover to cover, you probably should skip some of it, too. It covers so many aspects of nourishment that while you're basically guaranteed to find parts that are interesting or intriguing to you, you're also likely to run into parts that don't grip you that much. So skip the latter and dwell on the former to get the most enjoyment. And it makes for a good reference book, if you ever feel like learning about some given food or cooking process.
  
  The main takeaway I got from this book is the sheer magnitude of how much we as a species shape our food for our diverse and often competing needs and desires, and have for thousands of years. Animals and plants evolved to survive, not to nourish us. But between breeding, cooking, and various other tricks, we have optimized or otherwise significantly altered almost everything we consume, with some trade-offs but largely for the better. Plants as common as cabbage, lima beans, potatoes and lettuce have had some of their old wild, natural toxicity bred out of them. We cook them to draw out or disable more undesirable toxins and enzymes and to unlock nutrients, and we dilute toxins in the case of spices and herbs to the point where we find them enjoyable. Or we simply learned to love them, such as with chili plants which literally cause us pain. And for any two foods that technically come from the same plant or animal, in reality they come from different varieties that have been bred specifically for those foods (corn for eating plain vs for popping, grapes for wine vs for raisins, cows for meat vs for milk, etc). Strictly speaking, then, there's very little you could say is purely 'natural' out there no matter where you look. So it's not about whether or not you want to eat food taken straight from the bosom of mother nature, it's about in what way and to what extent you want to modify and control the food you eat. Organic vs processed is such a gross oversimplification, and means very different things from one type of food to the next.
  
  I read the ebook on my Kindle Fire, and there were some issues with the formatting. I hope whoever is in charge of that cleans it up someday. That said, the issues were minor, mostly just chunks of text where they shouldn't be. The links and most everything else was fine.
• 
  Emma Whear

  What an absolute chunker.
  
  It's a lovely compendium, but stressful to read when you know you'll be quizzed on it.
  
  Areas my knowledge has grown the most:
  -differences in types of alcohols
  -methods by which coffee is made and the effects
• 
  Markus Pe

  Ein gutes und umfangreiches Buch über alles essbare, wissenschaftlich angehaucht mit teils geschichtlichen Aspekten. Gab mir ein sehr gutes Grundverständnis und werde ich wohl als Nachschlagewerk noch nutzen.
• 
  Maryalene

  This is the rare book that I am marking as read but not rating. I can't remember where I saw this recommended or what I expected, but it is definitely not for me.
  
  On Food and Cooking is basically a textbook or encyclopedia of ingredients and cooking techniques. There are no recipes and while it might be interesting to flip through once or twice, I can't imagine why I would ever need or want this book. I don't really care that someone reported eating beets around 300 BC or that eggs are 75% water. I really don't want to be bogged down in the science of cooking; I just want to cook.
  
  So for me personally, this book is 1-star. However, I can't bring myself to actually rate it that because it is obviously well-crafted. For what it's trying to be, this book is definitely 5-stars. It's 800 pages of all the tedious details about ingredients and cooking methods that you never wanted to know, and Harold McGee gets props for putting together these comprehensive tome.
• 
  Diana

  Very comprehensive book for the average person who is really into food. It goes into the historical and scientific background of various foods. The writing style is easy to follow, so there's no getting lost with this book!
  
  I found the author's writing style to be a little too flowery, but it may just be that I am not enough of a food connoisseur to understand some of his descriptions. For example, he describes buffalo milk as being barnyardy and reminiscent of mushrooms and freshly-cut grass. These descriptions seem a bit subjective to me, but what do I know?
  
  This was one of my class texts, and it was surprisingly readable. Still a bit dull for reading on your own though. Some chapters look like they'll be exciting, like the chapter on sauce, but it's pretty much a chapter on the chemistry of thickening reagents.
• 
  Vicky

  When I ruined cream sauce by cooking it at a too hot temperature (so that instead of thickening, the cream just broke down into water and oil), I thought I needed to know a little more about exactly what was going on when I cooked. I asked my brother (scientist and cook) to get me something like that for my birthday, and he sent this book. Lots of interesting information for cooking geeks. I am not sure yet if it has improved my cooking, but it's still fun to read. Most interesting to me: the sections on nuts and bread.
• 
  Greymalkin

  Such a fun and interesting book. As a foodie and a scientist I appreciate his approach to cooking and food. I also love the sense of joyful curiosity that suffuses the book. I was lucky enough to attend a talk by Harold McGee and he is still just as charming and enthusiastic as he seems in the book. He had so many interesting facts to impart that I wished the talk was three times as long. I'd love to sit down and chat with him.
• 
  Elizabeth Theiss Smith

  Who knew that food science could keep you up late at night? This is a can't-put-it-down explanation of how cooking, pickling,preserving, fluffing, rising, kneading and all manner of other cooking techniques work. I return to McGee's explanations again and again. I am a better cook and a more appreciative eater as a result. Bravo Mr. McGee!
• 
  Rod Greener

  The finest book on food science and food history on the market!
  
  I will never actually be done reading as I go back to it all the time.
• 
  Esteban

  Great reading about a lot of facts on cooking, or debunking a lot of urban legends such as 'sealing' the meat in order to preserve tenderness.
• 
  Caroline

  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.
• 
  Emily M

  Not so much something to read cover to cover. But super interesting to dip into if, for example, you want to know how caramelization works, what the difference is between the fermentation of sake and beer, or how the compositions of cow, human, and whale milk compare.
• 
  Asimenia Phantasmagoria

  It's like an encyclopedia of food. It took me months to finish it but it was worth it. I feel i can trust everything he writes and the references at the end of the book are endless. I wish it would have more examples of common mistakes in the kitchen that could be explained by theory.
• 
  Cari Sly

  Absolutely fascinating! Looking forward to adding this as a culinary reference
• 
  Rafael Meirelles

  Another essential book for cooks and foodies :)
• 
  Luke Gruber

  Alas, it is finished. This book has all the intricate details of everything food. It’s referenced in every other cookbook I’ve read as “the encyclopedia of food.” However, keep it for reference.
  
  It’s too dry to read cover to cover, unless of course you’re fascinated by the lineage of food. Where it started, how it transformed, and how it’s used today.
  
  Also, it’s heavy on chemistry. I suggest to read the appendix first. It’s a refresher crash course.
  
  Overall, way less practical than I hoped for your simple home cook.