McGee: On Food & Cooking - Kitchen Science, History and Culture

Harold McGee first studied astronomy at Caltech, graduated in literature in 1973, and then earned his doctorate at Yale in 1978 on John Keats's romantic poetry, supervised by Harold Bloom. When he published the first edition of this book in 1984, he was teaching literature and writing at Yale. He was, in other words, a Keats scholar, not a chemist, which is by far the most important reason the book turned out the way it did.

No one had previously translated food science into something a cook could actually use. The technical literature existed but was written for industry, and cookbooks kept repeating explanations that hadn't been tested in a hundred years. McGee went through the research and rewrote it for people standing at a stove. Time called the first edition "a minor masterpiece," and that verdict has never needed revising.

For the twentieth-anniversary edition in 2004, he rewrote practically the entire text and expanded it by two-thirds. This edition is the result: 896 pages and 200 illustrations, structured more like an encyclopedia than a textbook. Milk, eggs, meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, grains, sauces, sugar and alcohol are each treated separately, with the chemistry, history and culture woven together rather than kept apart.

The impact is hard to overstate. The revised edition drove forward the entire scientifically grounded fine dining movement that Heston Blumenthal, Ferran Adrià and Thomas Keller came to represent, and it's often cited as a direct cause of the whole movement known as molecular gastronomy ever emerging in the first place.

That McGee signed the joint statement in 2006 in which he, Adrià, Blumenthal and Keller disowned that very term is one of history's more elegant details. He wrote the book that started it, then helped abolish the name.

Practically every modern technique book owes a debt to this one. Food Lab, Modernist Cuisine and Liquid Intelligence all build on work done by a literature scholar back in the eighties.

If you're only going to own one reference work on food, this is it. That's not a particularly controversial position.

Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 896
Language: English
First published: 1984, this second updated edition: 2004