On Harold McGee
According to Chow’s “Year in Food” round-up, 2006 was the year that molecular gastronomy “graduated … from geeky curiosity to major American culinary movement.” That means that 2007 might be the year that trend-followers everywhere hit the books and start cramming for the expert exam in this intellectual study of kitchen science. And the standard textbook will be Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen.
On Food and Cooking is not a cookbook. It’s a science book that explains ingredients and their behaviours—information that allows readers to work without cookbooks. The fifteen chapters cover everything from the coevolution of dairy cows and modern man to how to regulate the ratio of water to coffee in espresso. In today’s kitchens, that kind of knowledge has surpassed the “useful” mark and moved on to “crucial.”
The 2004 revision of McGee’s classic kitchen tome was as ahead of its time as the original 1984 edition (which pre-dated extra-virgin olive oil in American cuisine). In his introduction, the exuberant and inquisitive food scholar explains that “a lot has changed in twenty years! It turned out that On Food and Cooking was riding a rising wave of general interest in food, a wave that grew and grew and knocked down the barriers between science and cooking.” McGee suggests that he’s merely observing the water as it washes onto the beach—really, he’s Poseidon, God of the Sea.
The New York Times’ Dining & Wine section now relies on the author to discuss topics like innovations in bread baking and the toxicity of absinthe in his new “Curious Cook” column, and McGee has recently refashioned himself as a food blogger.
