Book of the Week: On Food and Cooking

25 Jul 2015

This week I read On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee since it was one of the recommended books for the Harvard class about food on edx, Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science. Harold McGee worked with Thomas Keller at the three Michelin star restaurant, The French Laundry. These guys know their food. The book is over 800 pages long, so I treated it as a reference book and did not read the whole thing. The Four Basic Molecules Food is made up of four basic molecules: water, lipids, carbohydrates and proteins. Water is everywhere. How things interact with water accounts for a lot of the action. How things dissolve in water and how water changes state affect your results. Lipids don’t like water and have high boiling points. Fatty food tastes better. Carbohydrates are mixed with water and show up as sugars and starches. Proteins are sensitive and change a lot depending on pH and temperature. Cooking is manipulating these molecules from their raw form into something delectable and amazing. Harvard I wonder why type of prep school student would take class on food at Harvard. It’s not likely they are going to cook themselves since they’ll be eating at fancy restaurants such as The French Laundry, which doesn’t even do your laundry for you. Some seek knowledge to impress other people rather than the pure pursuit of knowledge. This reminds me of the bar scene from Good Will Hunting and Richard Feynman talking about the name of a bird. Some people try to use their fancy pants knowledge to make others feel less about themselves, so they can feel better. I imagine having dinner with some student who took the course wanting to impress others with their knowledge. On the other hand, maybe a student of the class with pursue baking after getting degree in Applied Mathematics and Economics like Joanna Chang, who started Flour Bakery. Her cookie recipe from Flour got me plenty of compliments. I shouldn’t pick on Harvard. I sat in a seminar on BBQ at a physics conference in Texas. Good food is not reserved for the wealthy. The brisket used to be a cheaper piece of meat that was made edible by cooking it low and slow. Unfortunately, even brisket has been gentrified and now you have people like Franklin Barbecue. Before lobster was food for the poor, so there is no going back. Eggs There is a 50 page chapter on eggs. The chapter talks about the history of eggs, how eggs form biologically, different components of the egg, the chemistry inside the egg, at what temperature do different proteins in the egg solidify, egg dishes, egg safety, egg foams, egg-liquid mixtures, different ways to preserve eggs, how to tell the freshness of the egg, etc. More than what you would ever want to know about eggs. One of the most interesting things I learned is that if you cook an egg for a really long time (7 hours), the glucose in the whites will turn the egg white brown. Ramen I think the book dismissed an entire food group, instant ramen. It has one sentence about it and refers to it as Ra-men.