Customer Reviews

Cooking: The Quintessential Art (California Studies in Food and Culture)

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First off, this is not really a cookbook. There are some recipes derived in the text, but the process is what this book is about, not instructions for going into the kitchen and making something fabulous.

The book starts with the question of how can we judge a meal, how can we judge a dish, and moves forward through dialogs, cooking thought experiments, and mathematical digressions. It's molecular gastronomy chat time between This and chef Pierre Gagnaire.

Herve This seems to have an endless set of books arriving in the States recently and they deserve serious thought. Fundamentally cooking has to be based on and built up from science, but few chefs really understood anything of basic food chemistry or physics until fairly recently. That they were still able to produce wonderful meals is a tribute to their ability, but with more background, more could be possible surely? As strictly an amateur chef, but a professional scientist, I have learned the whys of so many kitchen "do it this way because" rules from This's other books. This one is much more of a discussion, a debate even, over the fundamentals of cooking. None of it has immediate utility to me, but it is interesting and fun. Perhaps it would be of more use to others?

So, I recommend the book, but return to the caution above, you won't be headed into the kitchen with this book.

This book is a little different than the other book from Herve This, Molecular Gastronomy, that I have read. It is more like an expanded version of the introduction in the previous work. I found this to be very interesting and inspiring. It also has a bit of a murder mystery feel to it, which at first seemed weird, but in the end was a reasonable way to tie all of the pieces together. There is not a single recipe I remember from this book. However, I found it to be very inspiring and has sent me off in new culinary directions. I would highly recommend this book for senior chefs in search of new inspirations, food historians, and young cerebral chefs. I do not think the causal cook looking for something to cook for Sunday roast or the Saturday Dinner party would enjoy this book. I could be wrong. This book and the other referenced here have both left my hands and been being passed around among a circle of cooks, so if you think you might be interested try it, you'll probably love it.

Move along, please. Not much to see here.No illustrations, nor colorful text, fpr that matter. If you want some food biochemistry, read Harold McGee. For gastronomy, Thomas Keller.