Sunday, November 2, 2008

Great Culinary Resource

I have recently discovered Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. (Although, from the blurbs on the back cover, it appears that every major player in the food world had already discovered it.) This is an amazingly comprehensive treatise on the named subjects, and if you are interested in food, you need this book.

For example, I was recently trying to find out the difference between blackstrap molasses and other kinds. McGee has an information-filled page, as opposed to a short (and not useful) paragraph in the Larousse Gastronomique, itself a worthy resource. Not only that, but I found myself in the middle of a fascinating section on the refining of sugar, with a lot of useful and interesting information on "factory" brown sugars like demerara, turbinado and muscovado and refinery brown sugars (all other kinds).

Not the kind of book to read cover-to-cover, but a truly wonderful and essential resource.

Bobby Jay

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