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Modernist Cuisine (QPC bait)
Jul. 12th, 2011 06:49 amFinally received my greatly delayed birthday gift from John. It's a copy of Modernist Cuisine, a six-volume magnum opus of food science put together by a team led by Nathan Myhrvold. (Yes, that Myhrvold.) It arrived in a carefully engineered double-layer double-strength box with a UPS "Team Lift" sticker on it. The delivery guy bitched about how heavy it was. I have to agree, it's enormously larger than I expected.
This is pretty exciting, as it's the cookbook I would have written myself if I had a billion dollars and a kilogram of methamphetamine to spare. It is one of those very rare culinary texts that brings theory to cooking in a serious and meaningful way. The El Bulli books are theoretical in a kind of artsy-fartsy academic sense; this book is more like a physics text. Lots of numbers and tables. Kind of witty, too - they devote a page to describing how you can calculate the speed of light by melting a slice of Velveeta in a microwave.
Some things I love about it:. There are mathematical models of heat conduction in frying pans, complete with colorful visualizations. There are lurid, whole-page color plates of foodborne parasites. There are "parametric recipes" with tables and scaling factors. There is an entire chapter on water.
I'm a little overwhelmed by it right now, as it's nearly 2500 pages and there's something interesting on every one of them. I sometimes wonder how consistent he is in his research - there is an extensive section on health and nutrition in which he devotes several pages to attacking the link between saturated fat and heart disease, and his conclusions are more than a little controversial. (If he's full of crap on this issue I swear I will throw the whole thing in the oven and burn it.)
The writing and layout is wonderfully clear and unpretentious, obviously the result of someone caring a lot about good communication. The photos, well, they can be a bit whimsical, and the illustrations of finished dishes are not quite up there with the photography of The French Laundry Cookbook or Trotter's series. But the photo techniques, including a lot of startling cut-aways, certainly break new ground.
Spent several hours with the set last night but I've barely scratched the surface.
Yes, you can borrow it!
This is pretty exciting, as it's the cookbook I would have written myself if I had a billion dollars and a kilogram of methamphetamine to spare. It is one of those very rare culinary texts that brings theory to cooking in a serious and meaningful way. The El Bulli books are theoretical in a kind of artsy-fartsy academic sense; this book is more like a physics text. Lots of numbers and tables. Kind of witty, too - they devote a page to describing how you can calculate the speed of light by melting a slice of Velveeta in a microwave.
Some things I love about it:. There are mathematical models of heat conduction in frying pans, complete with colorful visualizations. There are lurid, whole-page color plates of foodborne parasites. There are "parametric recipes" with tables and scaling factors. There is an entire chapter on water.
I'm a little overwhelmed by it right now, as it's nearly 2500 pages and there's something interesting on every one of them. I sometimes wonder how consistent he is in his research - there is an extensive section on health and nutrition in which he devotes several pages to attacking the link between saturated fat and heart disease, and his conclusions are more than a little controversial. (If he's full of crap on this issue I swear I will throw the whole thing in the oven and burn it.)
The writing and layout is wonderfully clear and unpretentious, obviously the result of someone caring a lot about good communication. The photos, well, they can be a bit whimsical, and the illustrations of finished dishes are not quite up there with the photography of The French Laundry Cookbook or Trotter's series. But the photo techniques, including a lot of startling cut-aways, certainly break new ground.
Spent several hours with the set last night but I've barely scratched the surface.
Yes, you can borrow it!
