Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.5
EAN num: 9780020098010
ISBN number: 0020098014
Label: John Wiley & Sons
Manufacturer: John Wiley & Sons
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 339
Printing Date: April 20, 1992
Publishing house: John Wiley & Sons
Sale Popularity Level: 286699
Studio: John Wiley & Sons
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Brief Book Summary:
When Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking was published in 1984, it proved to be one of the sleepers of the year, eventually going through eight hardcover printings. It was hailed as a minor masterpiece' and reviewers around the world prasied McGee for writing the very first book for the home cook that translated into plain English what scientist had discovered about our foods. Like why chefs beat eggs whites in copper bowls and why onions make us cry.'
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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I loved his very first book On Food and Cooking and I enjoyed this one. I made my living in the restaurant business, as a manager,then as a chef and finally an owner. I've always enjoyed cooking and eating. I'm retired but I still grind my own hamburg, fix my own sausage, make my own sauces and my wife cultivates a small herb garden. This book is fun. The point of view is fun, the writing is fun and the science is always interesting.
Once again this is not your typical recipe book. This is in another category. It's entertainment for the culinary inclined. It's history and science. The author now has his own blog or web page. It is called ... the curious cook ... of all things. I enjoy reading this fellow more than any other cooking expert that I have ever read.
Rated by buyers 
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If the author's mother ever told him to stop playing with his food, we can be glad he ignored her. Most of The Curious Cook is the happy result of what sounds like great playful time in the kitchen. There are essentially three focuses set out for this book:
*The very first and most useful is a set of master recipes based on the author's experiments with food. The chapter on fruit ices alone is reason enough to buy the book and anyone thinking about buying an ice cream maker will have a lot more fun if they buy this book too.
The section on beurre blanc is both a how-to and a paean to this simple, quick and beautiful sauce.(chapter 6) Anyone who ever makes their own mayonnaise will be grateful for chapter 8.
*There is a bit of lab science:Chapter 11-the pleasures of merely measuring-is a recounting and tribute to the truly nerdy curiousity that some of us cooks develop. McGee's writing is fluid and friendly and it makes the laboratory-manual topics seem positively inviting.
*The third section is some food and health stuff that recalls things you've probably read in consumer food-oriented magazines a dozen times. You could skip chapters 12-14 without missing much.
The Curious Cook is definitely a bed table cook's book (rather than a kitchen cookbook), and a delightful one. It's hard to imagine a food-lover not enjoying it.
Lynn Hoffman, author of The New Short Course in Wine
and the forthcoming bang-BANG from Kunati Press
Rated by buyers 
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This book, a sequel to On Food and Cooking, is a look at the culinary world through the eyes of pop science. Despite a drastically different approach by the author this time around (real kitchen experiments as opposed to just spinning endless yarns loosely based on a myriad, unfootnoted sources), the results are similar: closer to Danielle Steel than Scientific American. If you liked this book's predecessor, then you will certainly like this one; if you thought it was worthy of a garage sale, you are unlikely to have a different view of this sequel.
This book has 2 distinct parts. The very first one (190 pages) has eleven chapters, each focused on a specific subject and a series of related kitchen experiments that are fully documented. The nicely systematic approach of the author reminds one of a similar technique used by Cooks Illustrated magazine for their recipe development. The subjects are: cooking meat, oil splatter, simmering meats, purple colour of vegetables, de-gassing sun chokes, buerre blanc, hollandaise and bearnaise sauces, mayonnaise, artificial ripening of persimmons at home, fruit ices, and miscellaneous. Some of this material is of substantial practical value: the chapters on sun chokes and fruit ices have good recipes you can actually use. Those who are mystified by buerre blanc, hollandaise, or mayonnaise, or who have trouble making them, will find the appropriate chapters quite enlightening.
The second part, consisting of 6 chapters (120 pages) is mostly drivel. 3 chapters are devoted to the kind of stuff you can find in health magazines at the supermarket checkstand: dietary fat and heart disease, food and cancer, Alzheimer's and steel cookware. 3 chapters are devoted to a bit of culinary history: Brillat-Savarin, Maillard.
In the end, reading this book is fun, but I would not take the information it presents too seriously.
Rated by buyers -
Harold McGee is probably the most widely cited writer in American culinary writing today. Alton Brown literally genuflects at the mention of his name and complains that he is hard pressed to find a subject on which Herr McGee has not already explored at some length. His major work, `On Food and Cooking' appears to be on the short list of Culinary Institute of America references for their students, subsequent to Escoffier and their own references.
This work, `The Curious Cook', is a bit different that the other work, in spite of the subtitle `More Kitchen Science and Lore'. The larger book is largely theoretical. This book is largely experimental and its subtitle should be the title of the very first and longest section `Playing With Food'. The lesson taught here is probably the single most important lesson you can learn in any endeavor. That is, when in doubt, try a little experiment. When I was studying philosophy, this largely took the form of thought experiments, not unlike the development of a Science Fiction plot. `What would happen if there were artificial people who were indistinguishable from biological humans. The result is the story `Blade Runner'. When I worked with chemistry, this step was obvious. Oddly, I had to relearn the lesson when I became a professional programmer. It took a few years and more than a few books to learn the value of prototyping code, even for some of the most simple algorithms. All this means is that when you cook, YOU ARE ALLOWED TO TRY THINGS OUT WITH THE OBJECTIVE OF SEEING IF SOMETHING WORKS. My favorite example is in making and using a simple bechamel sauce to make macaroni and cheese or creamed chipped beef without having the sauce break.
I am constantly amazed at the blissful ignorance behind some common misstatements by very good professional chefs who have established themselves as celebrity educators on various TV cooking shows. I suspect the most common is the statement that laying meat into a hot saute pan sears the flesh to seal in the moisture. This misstatement is the subject of McGee's very first chapter, where with a simple kitchen scale, he demonstrates what should be common sense to anyone with some knowledge of physics. Application of high heat reduces the moisture in the meat. This essay was published before the Food Network was a gleam in network entrepreneurs' eyes, yet Emeril and Tyler and Rachael and even Wolfgang repeat this misstatement on a regular basis. The lucky thing about this statement is that searing meat or any other food for that matter, has a very important benefit, in that it develops flavor through caramelization and the Maillard reactions. By design or by chance, the explanation of the Maillard reactions come in the very last chapter of the book, providing the reason we have been searing food for millennia.
There are other books that deal with food and science. Some of the most recent and most famous are `Cookwise' by Shirley Corriher, `I'm Only Here for the Food' by Alton Brown, and `What Einstein Told His Cook' by Robert Wolke. All of these works are exceptionally good books. But, none of these works give the kind on encouragement and the kind of clues you need to find culinary answers on your own.
One warning may be in order. Science, i.e., the method of experimentation and observation is the most powerful method developed to answer questions and acquire knowledge, but it is certainly not enough to make you a superior cook. For example, I really like Alton Brown's `Good Eats' shows and I often use his recipes, but whenever I see Mario Batali do something in a different way than Alton, I invariably use Mario's recipe or method rather than Brown's suggestion. The heart of the reason behind this is that Mario Batali is a very, very good professional chef and Alton Brown is not. Preparing food is a fine mix between knowledge and artistic expression. Professional chefs know the best ways to do things to achieve the most desirable culinary result, even if they do not know the scientific explanation for why they do things in a certain way.
I will warn you that some of the essays in Parts II and III are a bit long on reflection and a bit short on practical application. I may even go so far as to say some of these sections are just a bit dull. In spite of this, the very first section on `Playing with Food' plus the essays on steel and the Maillard reactions are all pure gold for the dedicated foodie.
Very highly recommended for anyone interested in food.
Rated by buyers -
This is an odd sort of a book. If you were expecting to be enriched by lots of kitchen lore and simple explanations (which was my original aim) you would be disappointed. This book tells you much more about tidbits of history, physics, chemistry and physiology than tips and tricks for cooking and is, in truth, quite long-winded.
Now if you are also interested in the acquisition of knowledge of various sorts, common as well as obscure, and don't mind being the "most knowledgeable amateur" among your friends, this is an excellent source of information. The author spares no ink in serving up history, scientific theory and experiments (The famous oil drop experiment by physicist Millikan, a Caltech cohort of the author, was featured! Plus many of his own), findings in medicine, etc. in covering a subject, even "simple" ones like browning of vegetables by salad dressings.
If you managed through the very first couple of chapters, you will probably go on, and you will quickly find that the author is a no-nonsense scientist (Ah! the Caltech imprint) and his stuff is well baked, so to speak. By the time you finish the book, you will learn much more than a few useful tips to augment your cooking skills, and find your reading time quite well spent.
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