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Summary: The Foodie's Bible, Colorful and Endlessly Fascinating
Review: Food lovers can rest easy now that Harold McGee has updated his eminently readable 1984 tome, "On Food and Cooking". He is the literary counterpart to the Food Network's Alton Brown in providing an amalgam of history, science, literature, and cooking tips, spreading his knowledge across fifteen chapters, each devoted to a different food category. McGee leaves no food unturned. He starts rather appropriately with milk and dairy products, life-starting foods, and goes through edible plants, cereals, doughs and batters, wine and beer and distilled spirits, even basic food molecules. This is no dry scientific book, as McGee is a wonderfully colorful writer, lucid and endlessly fascinating.
McGee is truly a Renaissance man when it comes to food, and the book is packed with historical facts, literary anecdotes, and food legends passed down through the ages. For instance, when he talks about dairy products in the first chapter, he also brings up the domestication of the goat, the development of Parmesan, the history of ice cream and the best way to clarify butter. But his writing style is never contrived or pedantic and never gets in the way of the intriguing facts he brings to light. There are great illustrations and almost like a textbook, replete with easy-to-follow charts, graphs, and pictures, On the sidebars of each page, McGee shares insights from the likes of Brillat-Savarin, Plutarch and their culinary brethren along with ancient recipes for ash-roasted eggs, stuffed bonito with pennyroyal, and other delicacies. However, his focus is not purely historical, as he examines with great acuity, modern food production, current health risks and an easy-to-understand lesson on atoms, molecules, and the nature of energy. Rest assured that cooking basics are covered thoroughly. Would-be bakers can know what to expect with flour and why it behaves the way it does. Carnivores will discover what makes a tender stew or why it's such a delicate art to roast the perfect turkey. Even the seemingly trivial jumps off the page, for example, the fact that completely different cultures can produce such similar foods like kimchi and sauerkraut. Or one can realize that it takes 70,000 crocus flowers and 200 hours of labor to produce one pound of saffron. Only with this detail can one appreciate the exorbitant cost when you see it in the supermarket.
It's as if McGee has taken David Macaulay's wonderful book, "The Way Things Work", traded machinery for sustenance and mixed it all in a food processor to come up with an essential reference book one can read with pleasure and for education concurrently. Strongly recommended even for the non-food lover if such a creature exists.
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Summary: essential guide
Review: Having read about this book in the Dallas Morning News, I paid little attention to it at first, but decided to pick it up regardless...and upon opening to a random page, immediately learned ten things I hadn't known before. As a novice in the field of cooking, I still find this book to be indispensable and can only imagine how much more it would be to professionals.
My friend recommended this book highly and she recommended a great new beverage that replaced my morning cup of joe. Caffeine made me too jittery so I switched to a soy-based coffee that taste simply amazing. When I use my percolator it comes out with a rich, full bodied taste. Search under "S oyfee" on google to find it.
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Summary: What does a chemistry PhD read his to kid at bedtime.
Review: I bought this book as a birthday present for my husband, a former chemist and sometimes gourmet cook. He had enjoyed the original version of this book and also liked the Curious Cook. I heard that the revised edition was significantly updated, so I got it for him right away. I figured that he would periodically read chapters on his own. Here is what surprised me: It has become the bedtime story book for our almost 10 year old son. I knew that my husband would like it, so I excitedly showed it to my youngest son. He perusing it himself. Of course he did not understand much of it without lengthy explanations. So my husband started to read it to him, explaining the obscure parts. I thought that my son would get bored after a couple of nights of this, but they have been at it for quite a while and my son has not asked to switch books.
The author covers a wide variety of types of foods and food issues. It starts with seections based on food types. Milk and milk products are the first. Once you read about the chemical, physical and aesthetic properties of a food, you want to go out and try the foods or food combinations yourself.
The revised edition is significantly different from the original. If you are the type of person who likes the science behind food, you will probably also be the type who cares whether your information is up to date. If you are more of a chemistry dilettante like me, you will appreciate the interesting writing style and the relevance to current cooking and nutrition issues. If you are a science-oriented 10 year old, you will enjoy telling your classmates and teachers lurid details about what they are currently chewing. Since you can cloak these lurid details in legitimate basic science, the teachers generally have to let you keep talking.
This book explains the "why" of the way ingredients mix together to make a tasty or unpalatable food. While this is not a recipe cookbook, the author does provide valuable information on how to choose and store foods to ensure the best quality. Understanding the basic principles of food chemistry enables a cook to improvise and sometimes sustitute ingredients. It explains how the different constitutents of milk influence the milk's properties. This in turn helps explain how we arrive at different properties of cheeses. the author takes you from the overall look of the food down to the molecular level.
The book helps one understand food safety and spoilage. Advances in our understanding of food safety are reflected in this book.
In sum, I recommend this book for erudite cooks and chemists, as well as diletanttes (like me) who want to know more about selected foods. I would not recommend this as bedtime reading for most 10 year olds, but for a certain subset--the type of kid who is always asking "why" it might be a good source of answers.
(And yes, I read him regular books when it is my turn to do bedtime stories.)
Rating: 
Summary: Dense, but worth the effort
Review: I purchased this book on the tangential advice of Michael Ruhlman's "The Making of a Chef" -- it was one of the three Bibles of Cooking, if I remember correctly. As a scientist and a foodie/gastronome, I found this book fascinating and worth the effort of slogging through the tougher, denser, meatier bits.Mmmm, collagen.
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Summary: Buy this even if you already have the 1st edition
Review: I won't waste time by heaping even more of the well deserved praise and adoration upon this book as so many other already have. I will just say that if you have been hesitating about plucking down the money for it if you already have the old edition, I say hesitate no more. According to the intro, they've added 2/3 more content to the last one, and it shows. This is not a quick cash grab, but a well thought out effort with lots of brand new content, revisits with old topics, and focus on many of the areas (more international ingredients for example), that many of us were pining for in the last edition.
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Summary: McGee has outdone himself again
Review: In 1984, when the first edition of ON FOOD AND COOKING was published, it sent off a shockwave through the entire culinary industry. Never before had someone published such a massive study on how science affects cooking in all aspects. It quickly became a bible for professional chefs around the world, often simply referred to in conversation as simply "McGee".
For the 20th anniversary of the original publication, author McGee has rewritten about 90% of his original work, studying the various ways that the ensuing 20 years and the many advances affect the way we grow, harvest, cook, smell, taste, eat, and digest today.
Taking all the culinary and scientific changes that have taken place since the original edition under consideration, McGee has once again created the standard for understanding the relationship between food and science, and why things work the way they do.
He also addresses important topics such as irradiated food, the threats of disease such as Mad Cow disease, and the effects of aquaculture and genetic engineering on today's harvested food.
The book also looks at the many various techniques of preparing everything from the odd vegetable to the many different fish in the ocean, and nearly everything in-between.
McGee's historical and anecdotal style are easy to read, and more importantly, to understand. Once you've read a section, much of it will stay in your head, if only because the average cook will be saying to themselves, "Wow, I didn't know that!"
Although McGee is not a household name among home cooks, it should be. Much of the information offered up by the author in his guide through the food jungle would be very useful to home cooks as well as professional chefs. I would definitely recommend the book to EVERYONE who has any kind of interest in how food science affects our everyday lives. A must-have for any library.
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Summary: Nonpareil food reference
Review: McGee is the doyen of kitchen chemistry. As proof, look at the blurbs on the back cover from such as Kerrer, Kamman, Boulud, Corriher, and other culinary luminaries. I have been using the first edition for twenty years; this one is much more complete and incorporates much food science discovered in the last two decades. You can use it as reference, but since I got it I have just been reading it like a novel, except that you don't have to read it in any order. Despite being an accomplished amateur cook, I found myself repeatedly exclaiming "So that's why......!" as I perused the various chapters. The last two chapters, an introduction to chemistry and primers to the fours major food substances (water, lipids, carbohydrates, and proteins) is the very best brief written summary of these topics I have ever seen.
I could exhaust my thesaurus finding synonyms for "paragon" to describe this book, but just buy it, read it, and enjoy it.
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Summary: The "Lore" obscures the "Science", and vice-versa
Review: The many flaws in this book originally led me to give it 3 stars, but the more I look at other sources for the same information, the more I realize that for all its annoying qualities, this book really does appear to be the most comprehensive work on this subject. As such, I have to recommend it more highly, simply because you're not going to get the same infomation in any other single book. Be prepared to work hard for the knowledge, however. "On Food and Cooking" is a very comprehensive work that contains a lot of very useful and interesting information. It also contains a lot of less useful information, random historical musings, and general digressions. As a result, the useful/interesting information density is much lower than I'd like, particularly given the general "verbiage density" of the text. Perhaps part of the problem is that I've gleaned too much of the information already from other sources, so that I feel like I'm wading through a lot of common knowledge to get to the bits I care about. The book goes into a fair amount of historical detail about various ingredients. It doesn't focus on the historical aspects enough to be a "history of food" book, though, and the historical perspective tends to detract from the scientific content ratio simply by increasing the overall amount of text. Also, there are many variations on ingredients, food safety issues, etc., that were not considered significant in 1983, but which are more relevant today. There's no discussion of salmonella in the section on eggs, for example, and no discussion of things like the impact (or lack thereof) of RBGH on milk quality. The effects of organic methods in general are given short shrift. I have observed various quality differences in organic ingredients relative to more conventional ingredients (both for better and for worse), and had hoped for some quantitative discussion of what the physical differences are, and why. Compared to "The Science of Cooking" (my most recent read on the topic), this book doesn't cover some of the physics and organic chemistry as well, but it does go into better detail on some of the more biologically oriented topics. For example, osmotic pressure, the process by which salt and sugar preserve food, is covered fairly well in this book, while it is never directly mentioned in "The Science of Cooking". I also wish there had been better organization of the material in the book. "The Science of Cooking", for example, is organized like a textbook, with well-marked side bars and tables, allowing you to easily skip to (or over) information that may or may not be relevant. "On Food and Cooking", however, is organized more like a novel, making it difficult to use it for reference, and complicating efforts to skip over material that is not of interest. Also, some sections (for example the discussion of cheese) assume too much knowledge about the basic processes, making it sometimes challenging to correlate the underlying chemistry with actual kitchen mechanics. In general, the book has very few examples of "kitchen experiments" you can try yourself to develop an integrated sense of the qualitative and quantitative aspects of cooking. There are many discussions, for example, of the effects of pH on various processes, but little discussion of ways to manipulate the pH using different ingredients to help balance flavor against the needs of the chemical processes. I still haven't found the ideal source for this sort of information. "The Science of Cooking" is at least concise and very clear in what it does cover (which is why I gave it 4 stars instead of 3), but as I look back and compare it to "On Food and Cooking" again, I see some of the major holes in that book (which doesn't deal with the role of pH in cooking at all, for example). And so, my search continues.
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Summary: For those with a Serious Passion for food!
Review: This book has been my bible for the past 10 years. If you are really serious about being a great cook, this book is a must. I am not a professional chef and I have no formal training. Yet this book has given me an excellent education.
It is one thing to learn the art of cooking, which may be something that can never be taught. This is the science of cooking and understanding the science will give you the base of knowledge you need to become a true and accomplished chef.
I have substituted soy co ffee (you can find at www.so ycoff ee.c om) because its organic, made from soybeans, and find it gives me something warm and brown to drink in the am and I have actually grown fond of the flavor. I follow the method of using a french press for the best results. Plus it has health benefits like lowering cholesterol and fighting heart disease.
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Summary: AYURVEDA and food---6,000 years
Review: This book is great. I use it with my Ayurveda food/philosophy book AN ELEMENTARY TEXTBOOK OF AYURVEDA: MEDICINE WITH A SIX THOUSAND YEAR OLD TRADITION by Frank Ninivaggi, M.D., a Yale Medical School doctor.
I recommend them both.
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