I am an avid `Good Eats' fan and I really looked forward to this book. I got a copy as soon as it came out and set to reading it with a vengeance. I was as mortally wounded when on the third page there was a blatent misspelling which should have been caught by a reasonably skilled copy editor, but it wasn't. Bravely moving on, I encountered the statement which said heat is transferred in two ways. Wait a minute. Didn't my high school physics teacher say heat was conducted in three ways, radiation, conduction, and convection? In the next paragraph, AB goes on to speak at length about convection, but doesn't have this behavior join as an equal with the other two. I continued reading the book to the very end, but could not keep those two very early misstatements from clouding the stock I had originally set in the book, especially since in later chapters, convection seems to creep into equity the way it is discussed in the text.
But now, at long last, I revisit my boldly autographed copy of the book and confess my admiration for the book.
My first positive impression of the book was that, unlike one of my other heros, Jean Shepard, AB's humor does translate well from the spoken to the written word. I can only guess that this may be due to the humor of irony, where Brown is dealing very lightly, albeit very deftly, with two very serious subjects, science and cooking.
My next positive reaction, but no surprise, is that AB corrects almost every misstatement by every chef ever written or spoken on TV. My only hope is that since the book has won a James Beard award, professional chefs will take it seriously and correct some of their more egregious errors. Herein lies my dismay at the two misstatements near the beginning of the book. I was measuring AB's accuracy against a higher standard than I would someone like Emeril or Bobby Flay.
My most positive reaction to the book is that it does not rehash so many episodes of `Good Eats'. Maybe that's why, unlike my dear hero Jean Shephard, his writing comes off as fresh as it does. The book has all the feel of having been started from an empty MS Word document and not begun by cutting and pasting from scripts of various shows. Well done there, AB.
I confess that for as much as I like and respect AB's explanations of how recipes work, I was never entirely comfortable that he always had the very best spin on the recipes he presents. This is true of `Good Eats' and it is true of this book. This has a whole lot to do with AB's confession at the very beginning of the book. He is not a chef and, like Julia Child before him, never claimed to be a chef. He is an educator. That's not to say he can't cook and it is not to say he is not a talented cook. It's just that he is much better at communicating than he is at cooking. A chef, as David Boulud says, is someone who has cooked some of the same recipes over a thousand times and thereby know his ingredients and processes in a way that no one who just reads about them can possibly know. Thus, when Alton Brown and Mario Batali do the same thing in different ways, I will do it the way Mario says and not the way AB says, because Mario's livelyhood depends on his technique and the fact that it works.
But, cooking technique is not really what this book is all about. To borrow Alton's metaphor from the `mission statement' at the beginning of the book, I see Alton as a very good map maker. He will explain how caramelization works better than all the Food Network chefs put together, but I will still follow Mario's suggestions on how to oil and heat a saute pan or make pasta or even crack an egg. AB is a great mapmaker, but Mario and Jamie and Emeril probably know how to get from point A to point B with the tastiest result.
So, I don't generally cook AB's recipes, and I feel none the poorer for it. Those who feel the book is not practical are missing the point. The book intends to explain things that most chefs don't even understand. Techniques are more like thought experiments to make a point clear. Like the famous ironing board pasta making table, It is very unlikely I will actually duplicate the technique. As long as Alton continues to do what he does best, I will continue buying his books and watching his show. My only challenge to him is to avoid the temptation to release blatently exploitative products like the blank book marketed on the strength of his name and the reputation of this book.
Buy this book to learn why cooking works. Buy Julia Child's books to get good recipes.
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