Keys to Good Cooking: A Guide to Making the Best of Foods and Recipes

Publishers Information

About Keys to Good Cooking: A Guide to Making the Best of Foods and Recipes

Publisher Web Link: http://www.penguin.com/

The answers to many kitchen conundrums in one easy-to-use volume, from the author of the acclaimed culinary bible On Food and Cooking.

From our foremost expert on the science of cooking, Harold McGee, Keys to Good Cooking is a concise and authoritative guide designed to help home cooks navigate the ever-expanding universe of ingredients, recipes, food safety, and appliances, and arrive at the promised land of a satisfying dish.

A work of astounding scholarship and originality, Keys to Good Cooking directly addresses the cook at work in the kitchen and in need of quick and reliable guidance. Cookbooks past and present frequently contradict one another about the best ways to prepare foods, and many contain erroneous information and advice.

Keys to Good Cooking distills the modern scientific understanding of cooking and translates it into immediately useful information. Looking at ingredients from the mundane to the exotic, McGee takes you from market to table, teaching, for example, how to spot the most delectable asparagus (choose thick spears); how to best prepare the vegetable (peel, don’t snap, the fibrous ends; broiling is one effective cooking method for asparagus and other flat-lying vegetables); and how to present it (coat with butter or oil after cooking to avoid a wrinkled surface). This book will be a requisite countertop resource for all home chefs, as McGee’s insights on kitchen safety in particular-reboil refrigerated meat or fish stocks every few days. (They’re so perishable that they can spoil even in the refrigerator.); Don’t put ice cubes or frozen gel packs on a burn. (Extreme cold can cause additional skin damage)-will save even the most knowledgeable home chefs from culinary disaster.

A companion volume to recipe books, a touchstone that helps cooks spot flawed recipes and make the best of them, Keys to Good Cooking will be of use to cooks of all kinds: to beginners who want to learn the basics, to weekend cooks who want a quick refresher in the basics, and to accomplished cooks who want to rethink a dish from the bottom up. With Keys to Good Cooking McGee has created an essential guide for food lovers everywhere. (http://us.penguingroup.com/)

Author Information

About Harold McGee

Author Web Link: http://www.curiouscook.com/

I write about the chemistry of food and cooking. I took up this odd vocation after studies at the California Institute of Technology and at Yale University, where I wrote a doctoral thesis with the prophetic title “Keats and the Progress of Taste.” After several years as a literature and writing instructor at Yale, I decided to practice what I’d been teaching, and write a book: a book about the science of everyday life.

The result was the publication in 1984 of On Food & Cooking: The Science & Lore of the Kitchen, a 680-page compendium that brought feature articles in Time and People Magazines and won the Andre Simon Memorial Fund Book Award in Britain. My timing was lucky: America and Britain were awakening to the pleasures of good food and to the diversity of world cuisines, and On Food & Cooking helped satisfy the growing hunger for information about ingredients and techniques.

Six years after On Food & Cooking, in 1990, I published a shorter and more personal book, The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore. In the first chapters, I narrate my efforts to solve a variety of kitchen puzzles. (How much oil can you emulsify into a mayonnaise with one egg yolk? Gallons. Why does frying spatter end up on the inside surface of the cook’s eyeglasses? Gravity.) I then go in search of the solid principles that underlie the ever-changing scientific evidence linking diet and the major scourges of later life, heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease. And I conclude with reflections about the great gastronomical writer Brillat-Savarin and about the fundamental nature and appeal of cooked foods.

In 2004, after working on it for ten years, I published the second, completely revised edition of On Food & Cooking , which won several awards. Along the way I’ve contributed reviews and original research to the scientific journal Nature, and have written articles for many publications, including The New York Times, The World Book Encyclopedia, The Art of Eating, Food & Wine, Fine Cooking, and Physics Today. I’ve talked about food chemistry at the Culinary Institute of America and other professional schools, at Madrid Fusion, at universities, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Chemical Society. I’ve appeared on CNN, the National Geographic channel, and the public TV series “Diary of a Foodie”; and on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” “Fresh Air,” and “Science Friday.” In 1995 I was elected to the James Beard Foundation’s Who’s Who in American Food, and in 2005 Bon Appetit magazine named me food writer of the year.

I’m currently working on several book projects, and writing an occasional column on science and food for the New York Times. (http://www.curiouscook.com/)

Cookbooks by Harold McGee

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My Cookbook

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

by Harold McGee

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My Cookbook

Keys to Good Cooking: A Guide to Making the Best of Foods and Recipes

by Harold McGee