Paper Palate

For some of us, cooking is a little like magic. We don’t particularly know why stuff happens, we just know that it does. Pour a certain volume of chicken stock in a saucepan with arborio rice, and keep it heated for a certain amount of time and you get risotto. Use long grain rice instead of arborio and, if you’re lucky, you get porridge. We might make up theories about why fat rice is creamier than thin, but, it’s really just a mnemonic so we remember all of the arcane do’s and don’ts and incorporate it into our culinary repertoire. Yet, without true understanding like trying to remember all of those silly charms in Harry Potter except without all the pseudo-Latin.

For folks who need to know the science behind feast and flavor, there is a growing category of books that approach cooking with an empirical mind, eschewing gastronomic purple prose for precise descriptions of what separates the ideal dish from the mediocre. In many cases, these books presume a certain amount of foundational knowledge from the reader, and might be a little too challenging for the beginner. However, if you’re the sort of novice who’s tried to cook and faced one culinary disappointment after another, then these books might be helpful because, unlike the large reference texts or the pretty picture books, the food science books are most likely to tell you where you’re going wrong.

You won’t get the sheer volume of recipes that you would from Joy and you might find the paucity of pictures a little intimidating, but mastering any of these volumes should give you enough background knowledge, that in due time, you won’t need recipes. You can just improvise freely and carve your own path.

Books covered: The New Best Recipe, Cookwise and I’m Just Here For The Food.

Chris Kimball and his collective staff at Cook’s Illustrated magazine and its associated show, America’s Test Kitchen, have a fine reputation as diligent cooks who, through endless experimentation, will give you a recipe for “the best” pork chop or a “perfect” plate of sichuan noodles. Their recipes are often preceded with an essay that outlines their approach, how they tried one idea and rejected it because it made the dish too unbalanced or unpleasant; and these introductory pieces are normally longer than the recipe itself. To say that their process is exhaustive is an understatement, and one wonders what it must be like to be a taster at the Cook’s Illustrated offices, sampling one chocolate chip cookie after another. It must be like Hell. A Hell full of chocolate, that is.

Regardless, this empirical approach is the cornerstone of The New Best Recipe. Every entry in this book is preceded with an essay that describes various approaches that have tried to define a certain dish and how many of these attempts had been found wanting. For the novice led astray, this section may be more useful than the recipes themselves, since you might recognize many of your sins and thereby learn how to correct them. In general though, the essays are also useful because reading them gives you an understanding of the process as a whole, which is really where you want to be mentally when you’re ready to cook. You shouldn’t be following a recipe on autopilot, reading and performing Step One before even letting your eyes go down to Step Two. That way confusion lies. Read the whole piece — understand the entire story, the beginning and the end, and that will help you keep your place. You don’t have to memorize it, but at least have an idea of what you want and how you’ll get it. Make a plan, don’t just follow one.

When going through the New Best Recipe, it’s also important to keep in mind that the authors are defining “perfect” and “best” by their own biases. Some of us like garlic, salt or butter more than others. Their interpretations of ethnic dishes (like biryani) sacrifice authenticity for accessibility. Remember that their “best” might not necessarily be your favorite, but their approach is valuable. Pick this book up for the recipes, keep it for the testing process.

It’s tempting to say that Alton Brown is the telegenic equivalent of Chris Kimball, and that Good Eats is what America’s Test Kitchen would be without the pedantry. And that sort of simile would be wrong, though not because ATK and the New Best Recipe aren’t pedantic (because, well, they kind of are) and not because Good Eats isn’t too charming for its own good (it sometimes is) but because both of these programs are so different in their approach that they might as well be in separate categories. America’s Test Kitchen is a conventional cooking show, that focuses on a specific dish and derives an ideal preparation. Good Eats is a science show that happens to be about food, and giving you a recipe or two is almost incidental. New Best Recipe will teach you how to make a great roast chicken, Alton Brown’s I’m Just Here for the Food will give you a general lecture about roasting and will give you a roast chicken recipe as an example of roasting technique.

As a compendium of knowledge, I’m Just Here for the Food is a lot less structured than others, and its information is broken up in short, easy to digest bits. There’s a lot of clear space and large illustrations to make the book accessible to casual readers; and Brown’s snappy prose helps make time in the kitchen feel like a domestic adventure rather than a boring process. Like his show, he gets deep into the science of how food is transformed in cooking. You get molecular transformations and air convection diagrams, but it’s delivered with a deft mad scientist wit that keeps it from feeling like a rehash of a 10th grade chemistry text (and if you’re interested in that sort of thing, there’s some Harold McGee that we can recommend …)

While this approach certainly has its strengths in enticing the novice into the kitchen, it does come at a cost of breadth. Where most cookbooks can provide you with hundreds, if not thousands of recipes, I’m Just Here for the Food doesn’t even get past 100. The volume is rather slim, and even if paired with Alton Brown’s baking book, I’m Just Here for More Food , the knowledge imparted is basic enough that it can be easily outgrown. It’s not the sort of book that one would return to once they’ve gotten comfortable with the basic techniques of boiling, roasting, sauteing or braising. Still, as a place to start you can do far, far worse.

Shirley Corriher’s Cookwise lands somewhere between New Best Recipe and I’m Just Here for the Food. Actually, long-time viewers of Good Eats will recall a matronly guest chemist who is occasionally summoned, like Scotty on Star Trek, to provide intensely geeky descriptions of why the dilithium crystals in the warp drive chamber aren’t working, or why you shouldn’t add oil to your pasta water. That’s Shirley Corriher, and she’s been schooling the illustrious host more or less since the first season.

Like Alton Brown’s book, in Corriher’s Cookwise recipes play a secondary role to the essays and lectures that form the bulk of the book’s content. You get exhaustive treatises on flour and how gluten determines its behavior as dough. You get to learn about the chemistry of sauces and figure out what separates the smooth and rich from the thin and chunky. Then, you get recipes that are accompanied with charts that describe the purpose of each step in the sequence. What do you accomplish by sweating onions at this stage? Why is she telling you to roast at this temperature? Where New Best Recipe is focused and I’m Just Here … is accessible, Cookwise is erudite.

In all honesty, though, you’ll probably get more utility out of Cookwise as a secondary as opposed to introductory text. The essays and instructions have a general focus that covers a lot of beginner material, but you won’t really appreciate a lot of Corriher’s wisdom if you haven’t cooked and made enough mistakes to realize that what she writes is, indeed, wisdom as opposed to instruction. The indepth description of the roles of eggs and butter in sauces might go over the heads of novices, and the recipes themselves make no compromises for the timid. You are instructed to whisk your bernaise vigorously and constantly until it’s done. There is no mention of using a food processor as a shortcut because, presumably, food processors are for the weak.

In summary, if you’re interested in specific recipes, go with The New Best Recipe. If you’re in search of more basic, general knowledge, then pick up Alton Brown’s book. If you’re already familiar with the basics, or don’t mind a steeper learning curve, then go with Cookwise. Each of these should help you build the confidence to improvise your own recipes so that, ultimately, you can feel comfortable whipping up dishes without having to consult a book. I suppose that runs contrary to our interests on this blog, but for you as a cook, that’s always a noble goal, and one that I’d certainly support.