Books : The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.5
EAN: 9780020098010
ISBN: 0020098014
Label: John Wiley & Sons
Manufacturer: John Wiley & Sons
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 339
Publication Date: April 20, 1992
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Sales Rank: 545868
Studio: John Wiley & Sons
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
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 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."
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
I loved his 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.
Books written by Richard Noble - The Hobo Philosopher:
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"A Little Something: Poetry and Prose"
"Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother"
Rating:  -
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 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 ... Read More
Rating:  -
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 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, green color 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 ... Read More
Rating: -
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, next 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 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 ... Read More
Rating: -
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 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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