McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture

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The work is separated into sections that focus on the ingredients, providing the structure for the author to speculate on the history of foodstuffs and cookery, and the molecular characteristics of food flavors, [6] while the text is illustrated by charts, graphs, pictures, and sidebar boxes with quotes from sources such as Brillat-Savarin and Plutarch. [7] The book advises on how to cook many things (e.g., for pasta use abundant water, with reasons and the science behind everything [8] :575-6) and includes a few historical recipes (e.g., Fish or Meat Jelly, by Taillevent in 1375 [8] :584), but no modern recipes as such. [9] See also [ edit ]

In its principal homeland, central and south India, the zebu has been valued as much for its muscle power as its milk, and remains rangy and long-horned. The European dairy cow has been highly selected for milk production at least since 3000 BCE, when confinement to stalls in urban Mesopotamia and poor winter feed led to a reduction in body and horn size. To this day, the prized dairy breeds -- Jerseys, Guernseys, Brown Swiss, Holsteins -- are short-horned cattle that put their energy into making milk rather than muscle and bone. The modern zebu is not as copious a producer as the European breeds, but its milk is 25% richer in butterfat. The Sheep The sheep, Ovis aries, was domesticated in the same region and period as its close cousin the goat, and came to be valued and bred for meat, milk, wool, and fat. Sheep were originally grazers on grassy foothills and are somewhat more fastidious than goats, but less so than cattle. Sheep's milk is as rich as the buffalo's in fat, and even richer in protein; it has long been valued in the Eastern Mediterranean for making yogurt and feta cheese, and elsewhere in Europe for such cheeses as Roquefort and pecorino. McGee, Harold (1987). "Trials of the gluttons for punishment". Nature. 326 (6116): 907–908. Bibcode: 1987Natur.326..907M. doi: 10.1038/326907a0. It's a matter of overcoming fear. Anything that's frozen is not going to go bad. It's probably not going to be very pleasant, so the only way to answer that question is to take them out, try 'em. If you can tolerate them, drown them in a sauce and disguise the fact that they're cardboardy in texture, otherwise toss them."

Table of Contents

First thing - this is not a recipe book and it is a pretty serious book. You can use it as dictionary, using the very good index to browse and learn snippets at will. Reading a chapter from beginning to end takes its time and it is incredibly rewarding. I have been reading about cooking, and experimenting since I was a child, I own too many cookbooks to easily confess, and this is finally a book which puts things in context, which makes me understand the science of why this or that, put into cultural and historical context. For example did you know about differences between american and european flour? Third, all culinary professionals who have anything whatsoever to do with teaching should read this book from cover to cover, twice. There is absolutely nothing more annoying than having a person in the role of teacher make a patently false statement in their area of expertise. The number of times a Food Network culinary celeb misuses the term `dissolve' when they really mean `emulsify' or simply `mix' would fill volumes. It is still a common mistake to say that searing protein seals in juices. There are many good reasons for searing. Preventing the escape of liquid is not one of them. Even Brown himself has made some gaffs in print and on `Good Eats' such as when he described a very corrosive compound as a strong acid rather than a strong base. He confused one end of the pH scale with the other. In semitropical India, most zebu and buffalo milk was allowed to sour overnight into a yogurt, then churned to yield buttermilk and butter, which when clarified into ghee (p. 37) would keep for months. Some milk was repeatedly boiled to keep it sweet, and then preserved not with salt, but by the combination of sugar and long, dehydrating cooking (see box, p. 26). McGee, Harold (1998). "In victu veritas". Nature. 392 (6677): 649–650. Bibcode: 1998Natur.392..649M. doi: 10.1038/33528. PMID 9565025. S2CID 4383793. On wooden vs. plastic cutting boards: "It turns out that wooden cutting boards are good in a couple of ways — they're porous so they tend to soak up juices from cutting meats and fish, for example, and that carries the bacteria down into the cutting board where they're not at the surface anymore. And woods often contain anti-bacterial compounds in them so there's kind of a natural antibiotic in the surface of the wood. Plastic cutting boards are easier to clean and are safer to put in the dishwasher, for example, but they also will tend to develop scars and bacteria will lodge in the scars and cause problems later. So I actually have a couple of each and use both. When a plastic cutting board develops scars, I replace it."

Mcgee, Harold (1990). "Recipe for safer sauces". Nature. 347 (6295): 717. Bibcode: 1990Natur.347..717M. doi: 10.1038/347717a0. PMID 2234048. S2CID 4348407. qlacross, about one-fiftieth the size of a fat globule. Around a tenth of the volume of milk is taken up by casein micelles. Much of the calcium in milk is in the micelles, where it acts as a kind of glue holding the protein molecules together. One portion of calcium binds individual protein molecules together into small clusters of 15 to 25. Another portion then helps pull several hundred of the clusters together to form the micelle (which is also held together by the water-avoiding hydrophobic portions of the proteins bonding to each other). The box below shows the nutrient contents of both familiar and unfamiliar milks. These figures are only a rough guide, as the breakdown by breed indicates; there's also much variation from animal to animal, and in a given animal's milk as its lactation period progresses.Industrial and Scientific Innovations Beginning around 1830, industrialization transformed European and American dairying. The railroads made it possible to get fresh country milk to the cities, where rising urban populations and incomes fueled demand, and new laws regulated milk quality. Steam-powered farm machinery meant that cattle could be bred and raised for milk production alone, not for a compromise between milk and hauling, so milk production boomed, and more than ever was drunk fresh. With the invention of machines for milking, cream separation, and churning, dairying gradually moved out the hands of milkmaids and off the farms, which increasingly supplied milk to factories for mass production of cream, butter, and cheese. The Milk Factory The mammary gland is an astonishing biological factory, with many different cells and structures working together to create, store, and dispense milk. Some components of milk come directly from the cow's blood and collect in the udder. The principal nutrients, however -- fats, sugar, and proteins -- are assembled by the gland's secretory cells, and then released into the udder. 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. You are a little opinionated, and I have had some trouble in making you understand that the phenomena which take place in your laboratory are nothing other than the execution of the eternal laws of nature, and that certain things which you do without thinking, and only because you have seen others do them, derive nonetheless from the highest scientific principles. Until industrial times, dairying was done on the farm, and in many countries mainly by women, who milked the animals in early morning and after noon and then worked for hours to churn butter or make cheese. Country people could enjoy good fresh milk, but in the cities, with confined cattle fed inadequately on spent brewers' grain, most people saw only watered-down, adulterated, contaminated milk hauled in open containers through the streets. Tainted milk was a major cause of child mortality in early Victorian times.