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On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen

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Technical innovation has radical consequences on how and what we eat. In the 17th century, cooks discovered that beating egg whites in copper bowls gave body and volume to exciting new foams which they could set as meringues and soufflés. Not much earlier, a very bright cook worked out how to replace a sheep's stomach with a floured cloth for boiling puddings - hello hasty pudding, Christmas pudding, Sussex pond pudding and that entire British repertoire of merry stodge. And a few years later, Denys Papin demonstrated the "digester" or proto-pressure cooker, turning bones to pap in hours. These were big steps, and their like may be multiplied all the way to the microwave and the mechanical blender, but it's not exactly the men-in-white-coats image we now have of kitchen science. Harold McGee is the author of several books on the chemistry and history of food. He also writes a regular column debunking kitchen myths for The New York Times. The Mediterranean world of Greece and Rome used economical olive oil rather than butter, but esteemed cheese. The Roman Pliny praised cheeses from distant provinces that are now parts of France and Switzerland. And indeed cheese making reached its zenith in continental and northern Europe, thanks to abundant pastureland ideal for cattle, and a temperate climate that allowed long, gradual fermentations.

Dairying was unknown in the New World. On his second voyage in 1493, Columbus brought sheep, goats, and the first of the Spanish longhorn cattle that would proliferate in Mexico and Texas. In the animal world, humans are exceptional for consuming milk of any kind after they have started eating solid food. And people who drink milk after infancy are the exception within the human species. The obstacle is the milk sugar lactose, which can't be absorbed and used by the body as is: it must first be broken down into its component sugars by digestive enzymes in the small intestine. The lactose-digesting enzyme, lactase, reaches its maximum levels in the human intestinal lining shortly after birth, and then slowly declines, with a steady minimum level commencing at between two and five years of age and continuing through adulthood.Raw Milk Careful milking of healthy cows yields sound raw milk, which has its own fresh taste and physical behavior. But if it's contaminated by a diseased cow or careless handling -- the udder hangs right next to the tail -- this nutritious fluid soon teems with potentially dangerous microbes. The importance of strict hygiene in the dairy has been understood at least since the Middle Ages, but life far from the farms made contamination and even adulteration all too common in cities of the 18th and 19th centuries, where many children were killed by tuberculosis, undulant fever, and simple food poisoning contracted from tainted milk. In the 1820s, long before anyone knew about microbes, some books on domestic economy advocated boiling all milk before use. Early in the 20th century, national and local governments began to regulate the dairy industry and require that it heat milk to kill disease microbes. McGee, Harold J.; Long, Sharon R.; Briggs, Winslow R. (1984). "Why whip egg whites in copper bowls?". Nature. 308 (5960): 667–668. Bibcode: 1984Natur.308..667M. doi: 10.1038/308667a0. S2CID 4372579. For its twentieth anniversary, Harold McGee prepared a new, fully revised and updated edition of On Food and Cooking. He has rewritten the text almost completely, expanded it by two-thirds, and commissioned more than 100 new illustrations. As compulsively readable and engaging as ever, the new On Food and Cooking provides countless eye-opening insights into food, its preparation, and its enjoyment. As I finished, I realized that cooks more serious than my friends and I might be skeptical about the relevance of cells and molecules to their craft. So I spent much of the introduction trying to bolster my case. I began by quoting an unlikely trio of authorities, Plato, Samuel Johnson, and Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, all of whom suggested that cooking deserves detailed and serious study. I pointed out that a 19th-century German chemist still influences how many people think about cooking meat, and that around the turn of the 20th century, Fannie Farmer began her cookbook with what she called "condensed scientific knowledge" about ingredients. I noted a couple of errors in modern cookbooks by Madeleine Kamman and Julia Child, who were ahead of their time in taking chemistry seriously. And I proposed that science can make cooking more interesting by connecting it with the basic workings of the natural world. Brown, Alton, TIME Magazine (April 30, 2009). "The 2008 TIME 100". Time. Archived from the original on May 5, 2008. {{ cite magazine}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list ( link)

On Food and Cooking is a unique blend of culinary lore and scientific explanation that examines food -- its history, its make-up, and its behavior when we cook it, cool it, dice it, age it, or otherwise prepare it for eating. Generously spiced with historical and literary anecdote, it covers all the major food categories, from meat and potatoes to sauce béarnaise and champagne. Easy-to-understand scientific explanations throw light on such mysteries as why you can whip cream but not milk what makes white meat white whether searing really seals in flavor how to tell stale eggs from fresh why "fruits" ripen and "vegetables" don't how to save a sauce what hops do and what happens when you knead dough. A chapter on nutrition reveals that Americans have been obsessed with their diet since the 1800s and exposes the fallacies behind food fads past and present. There's a section on additives -- a not-so-new addition to food -- and taste and smell, our two pleasure-giving versions of the oldest sense on earth. With more than 200 illustrations, including extraordinary photographs of food taken through the electron microscope, this book will delight and fascinate anyone who has ever cooked, savored, or wondered about food"--Publisher description The basic flavor of fresh milk is affected by the animals' feed. Dry hay and silage are relatively poor in fat and protein and produce a less complicated, mildly cheesy aroma, while lush pasturage provides raw material for sweet, raspberry-like notes (derivatives of unsaturated long-chain fatty acids), as well as barnyardy indoles. On Food and Cooking continues to be the most accurate source of information for generations of chefs. A charismatic teacher, Harold is a veritable fountain of information and without peer in our industry." —Thomas Keller

Cressey, Daniel (2009). "Q&A with Harold McGee: The molecular master chef". Nature. 458 (7239): 707. doi: 10.1038/458707a. PMID 19360069. Twenty years ago the worlds of science and cooking were neatly compartmentalized. There were the basic sciences, physics and chemistry and biology, delving deep into the nature of matter and life. There was food science, an applied science mainly concerned with understanding the materials and processes of industrial manufacturing. And there was the world of small-scale home and restaurant cooking, traditional crafts that had never attracted much scientific attention. Nor did they really need any. Cooks had been developing their own body of practical knowledge for thousands of years, and had plenty of reliable recipes to work with. Milk owes its milky opalescence to microscopic fat globules and protein bundles, which are just large enough to deflect light rays as they pass through the liquid. Dissolved salts and milk sugar, vitamins, other proteins, and traces of many other compounds also swim in the water that accounts for the bulk of the fluid. The sugar, fat, and proteins are by far the most important components, and we'll look at them in detail in a moment. McGee, Harold (1987). "Trials of the gluttons for punishment". Nature. 326 (6116): 907–908. Bibcode: 1987Natur.326..907M. doi: 10.1038/326907a0. On Food And Cooking: The Science And Lore Of The Kitchen is a book by Harold McGee, published by Scribner in the United States in 1984 and revised extensively for a 2004 second edition. [1] [2] It is published by Hodder & Stoughton in Britain under the title McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture.

The modern imagination holds a very different view of milk! Mass production turned it and its products from precious, marvelous resources into ordinary commodities, and medical science stigmatized them for their fat content. Fortunately a more balanced view of dietary fat is developing; and traditional versions of dairy foods survive. It's still possible to savor the remarkable foods that millennia of human ingenuity have teased from milk. A sip of milk itself or a scoop of ice cream can be a Proustian draft of youth's innocence and energy and possibility, while a morsel of fine cheese is a rich meditation on maturity, the fulfillment of possibility, the way of all flesh.It was vastly overstated. It was true, sometimes, of certain nutrients in certain vegetables, but not across the board. Then I talked with some plant physiologists, who explained that plants are very adaptable creatures and if you change their growing conditions they're going to change their metabolism, and it's not all in one direction. Their feeling was that a lot of the things that are useful in plant foods, such as antioxidants, are made by the plant in response to stress." McGee is a visiting scholar at Harvard University. [4] His book On Food and Cooking has won numerous awards and is used widely in food science courses at many universities. Harold McGee (Food science writer): On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen on YouTube, iBioMagazine Creaming When milk fresh from the udder is allowed to stand and cool for some hours, many of its fat globules rise and form a fat-rich layer at the top of the container. This phenomenon is called creaming, and for millennia it was the natural first step toward obtaining fat-enriched cream and butter from milk. In the 19th century, centrifuges were developed to concentrate the fat globules more rapidly and thoroughly, and homogenization was invented to prevent whole milk from separating in this way (p. 23). The globules rise because their fat is lighter than water, but they rise much faster than their buoyancy alone can account for. It turns out that a number of minor milk proteins attach themselves loosely to the fat globules and knit together clusters of about a million globules that have a stronger lift than single globules do. Heat denatures these proteins and prevents the globule clustering, so that the fat globules in unhomogenized but pasteurized milk rise more slowly into a shallower, less distinct layer. Because of their small globules and low clustering activity, the milks of goats, sheep, and water buffalo are very slow to separate.

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