Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

  • Apple
  • Android
  • Windows Phone
  • Android

To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number.
Download to your computer
Kindle Cloud Reader
Facebook Twitter Pinterest <Embed>
Buy New
$27.19
  • List Price: $40.00
  • Save: $12.81 (32%)
Free Shipping for Prime Members | Fast, FREE Shipping with Amazon Prime
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.
On Food and Cooking: The ... has been added to your Cart
Trade in your item
Get a $6.63
Gift Card.
Trade in
Learn More
Have one to sell? Sell on Amazon
Flip to back Flip to front
Listen Playing... Paused   You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more
See all 3 images

On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen Hardcover – .dff, November 23, 2004

by
Harold McGee (Author)
› Visit Amazon's Harold McGee Page
Find all the books, read about the author, and more.
See search results for this author
Are you an author? Learn about Author Central
Harold McGee (Author)
4.8 out of 5 stars 570 customer reviews
See all 9 formats and editions Hide other formats and editions
Price
New from Used from
Kindle
"Please retry"
$19.99
— —
Hardcover, .dff
"Please retry"
$27.19
$18.99 $15.45
Paperback
"Please retry"
—
$69.82 $131.01
Amazon Book Review
The Amazon Book Review
Discover what to read next through the Amazon Book Review. Learn more.
$27.19 Free Shipping for Prime Members | Fast, FREE Shipping with Amazon Prime In Stock. Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.
click to open popover

Frequently Bought Together

  • On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
  • +
  • The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America's Most Imaginative Chefs
  • +
  • The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science
Total price: $77.55
Buy the selected items together

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.
Back
  1. The Professional Chef
    The Culinary Institute…
    4.8 out of 5 stars 357
    Hardcover
    $40.50 Prime
  2. The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America's Most Imaginative Chefs
    Karen Page
    4.7 out of 5 stars 1,051
    Hardcover
    $22.89 Prime
  3. Math for the Professional Kitchen
    The Culinary Institute…
    4.5 out of 5 stars 36
    Paperback
    $31.29 Prime
  4. CookWise: The Hows & Whys of Successful Cooking, The Secrets of Cooking Revealed
    Shirley O. Corriher
    4.6 out of 5 stars 189
    Hardcover
    $22.34 Prime
  5. Keys to Good Cooking: A Guide to Making the Best of Foods and Recipes
    Harold McGee
    4.1 out of 5 stars 69
    Hardcover
    $30.33 Prime
  6. The Book of Yields: Accuracy in Food Costing and Purchasing
    Francis T. Lynch
    4.3 out of 5 stars 81
    Plastic Comb
    $43.15 Prime
Next

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Read more

From Scientific American

Read more
See all Editorial Reviews
NO_CONTENT_IN_FEATURE
See the world with fresh eyes
through these editor's picks from Kindle. See more

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 896 pages
  • Publisher: Scribner; Rev Upd edition (November 23, 2004)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0684800012
  • ISBN-13: 978-0684800011
  • Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 1.8 x 9.2 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (570 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,363 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsDefinitive Text on Food Science AND Lore. Buy It.
By B. Marold HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWER on December 3, 2004
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
This red `On Food and Cooking, The Science and Lore of the Kitchen' by Harold McGee is a new edition of what is the most widely quoted culinary work in English. It may be almost as influential on the thinking of culinary professionals as Julia Child's `Mastering the Art of French Cooking' was on attitudes of American home cooking. The testimonials from the likes of Thomas Keller, Paula Wolfert, Jacques Pepin, and Rose Levy Beranbaum just begins to tell you how important McGee's volume has become. I was immensely pleased to see the exchange of acknowledgments between McGee and Keller to see how much the academic can learn from the professional chef.

I can devote my thousand words on how good this book has been to the culinary world, but most of you already know that. What I will do is to list all the reasons one may wish to read this book.

First, the book is simply interesting to amateur foodies and culinary professionals. This is the serendipity principle. If you prospect in a rich land, you will invariably find something of value. The `lore' in the subtitle is not an afterthought. The book includes history, linguistics and cooking practice in addition to simple science.Read more ›
18 Comments 1,082 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
Report abuse
5.0 out of 5 starsthe new and improved bible of food and cooking
By Joseph Adler VINE VOICE on December 2, 2004
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
This is a truly unique and wonderful book. It contains a tremendous amount of information about the food we eat. It shows the structure and composition of animals, plants, eggs, liquids, and seeds, explaining why each one has certain characteristics (for example, it turns out that the smell of fish comes from the decomponsition of a chemical in ocean fish cells that maintains the proper pressure balance with salt water). It explains what happpens when ingredients are chopped, mixed, heated, cooled, fermented, or otherwise transformed.

I discovered the first edition about five years ago, and it permanently changed how I think about food and how I cook. Since then, I've seen many other chefs mention this book. For example, in Michael Ruhlman's book "The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute," CIA students often study this (unrequired) book to better understand what they're doing.

You should be aware that this book is more an encypclopedia than an a recipe book or a collection of essays. If you're looking for a fun discussion of food science, then Alton Brown's "I'm just here for the food" may be a better choice. If you're looking for recipes that are optimized by principles of food science, I'd recommend Shirley O. Corriher's "Cookwise." (Actually, I'd recommend both of those books anyway.) Some readers may find "On Food and Cooking" a little bit too dense and technical to read from cover to cover, but as a reference book, it's unmatched.

The second edition is a great improvement over the first, and I'd strongly recommend it not only to new readers but to anyone who read the first edition. (Just the new section on fish makes this book worth purchasing.Read more ›
Comment 386 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
Report abuse
5.0 out of 5 starsThe Foodie's Bible, Colorful and Endlessly Fascinating
By Ed Uyeshima HALL OF FAME on December 11, 2004
Format: Hardcover
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.Read more ›
Comment 114 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
Report abuse

Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 starsThree Stars

Amazing book, but the front cover was bent out of the box :/

Published 4 days ago by Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 starsGreat gift for your aspiring chef friends or just for kitchen geeks...

Great gift, went through this with friends with the online MIT kitchen chemistry course and it was tons of fun. Read more

Published 10 days ago by Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 starsCooking science

Great science book that involves cooking

Published 16 days ago by Robert
4.0 out of 5 starsFour Stars

ThankYou

Published 17 days ago by Daniel L. Shane
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Love this book.

Published 17 days ago by Nicole Hirschfelder
5.0 out of 5 starsGreat food science book

A great book for food science buffs. Author is well known as a food science expert. Love this book.. earlier version just as good

Published 18 days ago by DEO
5.0 out of 5 starsOutstanding. Authoritative--in the face of lots of mass media ...

Outstanding.
Authoritative--in the face of lots of mass media misleading information.

Every thinking cook should have it.

Published 20 days ago by sara Chase
5.0 out of 5 stars... was exactly what she wanted and that she just loved it!

It was a gift for my granddaughter and she said it was exactly what she wanted and that she just loved it!

Published 1 month ago by Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

great

Published 1 month ago by Pennye W.
5.0 out of 5 starsShowed up before they said it would and in great condition. This is...

Showed up before they said it would and in great condition.

This is the perfect book for anyone interested in cooking that's also a nerd. Read more

Published 1 month ago by ThisIsMyAmazonName

Set up an Amazon Giveaway

On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway
This item: On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
Set up a giveaway

There's a problem loading this menu right now.

Learn more about Amazon Prime.

Pages with Related Products. See and discover other items: complex numbers