Cookbook Decoder or Culinary Alchemy Explained

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Summary: The Right Chemistry
Review: Arthur Grosser makes acquiring useful knowledge an appetising prospect. This book's combination of chemical facts, easy and delicious recipes and fun cartoons makes it an excellent read and a useful gift. The text is clear, the style amusing and the results gratifyingly edible - and drinkable - try recipe 121 followed by 120!

Rating:
Summary: Cooking is not just for eating
Review: I am both a chemist and an amateur chef. I have, on occasion, cooked chinese food for as many as 25 people - which is not bad considering that I am not Chinese! But, of course, the question that always lies at the back of my mind when making something is "why?" as in "why do eggs turn white when fried?" or "why does cornstarch thicken a sauce?". Arthur Grosser's "The Cookbook Decoder or Culinary Alchemy Explained" answers these questions and many more. It is an engaging tour through the chemistry behind cooking by a master chef. It is filled with gentle explanations and interesting experiments. And some absolutely delightful recipes. What more can you want in a book?

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Summary: Food Facts explained with Humor, plus really useful recipes.
Review: `The Cook Book Decoder or Culinary Alchemy Explained' by retired Canadian professor of Chemistry, Arthur E. Grosser is easily the spiritual godfather of current impresario of culinary information, Alton Brown, in that it seeks to explain everyday cooking phenomena with a big dollop of humor.

While this little book pales in comparison to Harold McGee's encyclopedic coverage of food science in `On Food and Cooking', this book serves its purpose by making it easy to read and to understand a few good facts about a few really important aspects of food chemistry. Oddly enough, the book also can revive interest in some backwaters of cooking technique.

It is meet and right that the very first subject is the egg, the single most useful natural product in the kitchen. In this chapter, the author introduces a feature of his book that would make it an excellent text for a grammar school or middle school course in food science. A chemist to the end, the author offers numerous suggestions on simple experiments that may be performed with standard kitchen equipment. The first topic is the whys and wherefores of cooking a hard-boiled egg. This is my first sense that the good professor may have a few clay feet. In my great survey of cooking praxis, there are two competing methods for successfully making a hard-boiled egg. The method endorsed by this author suggests poking a hole in the blunt end of the eggshell and dropping the prepared egg into boiling water. The alternate method which my experience shows works equally well involves placing the raw eggs in cold water in a pan on the burner and bringing the water and eggs up to boiling whereupon both methods have us simmer eggs for about 12 minutes. Oddly, the second method relies on a fact of egg anatomy that the author clearly describes and uses as a justification for his recommendation. This is the presence of tiny pores in the eggshell at the blunt end. The cold start uses these by increasing heat slowly. The hot start uses the same principle, but helps its case by creating a much larger hole to let air escape from the egg rather than build up pressure and crack the shell. All of this is relatively unimportant beside the fact that the author's discussion of egg cookery is both entertaining and informative.

One of this book's greatest services may be the author's giving us procedures on how to bake and how to coddle eggs. I have not seen such loving attention paid to egg cookery lately except in the very French `Essential Cuisine' by Chef Michel Bras. Compared to the arcane techniques needed to poach eggs or cook omelets, coddling and baking seem to be simplicity itself. And, coddling offers an enormous range of enhancements comparable in many ways to the great variety of omelet preparations.

Aside from eggs, the author discusses:

Vegetables, especially their colors and how colors are affected by cooking.
Garlic, Onions, Cabbage, and Potatoes, and how these smelly veggies can be tamed
Beast and Bird and how to keep juicy
Fish: Food for Thought and how to fry
A Bowl of Plastic Fruit and Thou
Sauces, Cereal, Pasta and Other Thick Things
Desserts: "It Comes with the Meal"
Baking: "If It's Enriched, It Needs Enrichment"
Beverages: The Devil's Works

Each chapter ends with a nice little resume that is much more a collection of mottoes for improving our cooking than it is a summary of the facts presented in the chapter. These are suggestions you hear from all the `Food Network' experts for which our author has given us the explanation of why these are good things to do or to avoid. This `resume' is the basis for the book's whimsical title, as it explains this kitchen lore which cookbook writers and chefs have been following for generations, often with no thought to why the practices work.

I did find a few other nits to pick. The author was curiously obtuse in explaining the origin of the term `Maillard reactions', as if this former professor was quite satisfied in passing on what may be no more than hearsay. These phenomenons, along with caramelization, are two cornerstones of our understanding of what happens when high heat encounters sugars and protein. This tells me that while the good professor was a chemist, he was not a professional `food chemist'. Another small lapse is in his explanation of why it is important to have a high oil temperature when putting fish in to fry. Grosser states that this is needed to form a crust to keep the oil from entering the flesh and creating a greasy dish. A much more likely explanation from both Alton Brown and Shirley Corriher is that the high heat turns water in the food into steam and the outward pressure of the steam bars the oil from entering the food. While it may seem to be a small point, as both explanations recommend a high oil heat, the steam explanation means that food should be removed from the hot oil as soon as the flesh is cooked, while the crust explanation suggests the food could stay in the oil indefinitely without becoming greasy. So, the correct explanation is important for practical cooking.

As mentioned at the outset, this book makes excellent use of humor to make this subject entertaining. Other virtues that distinguish this book from some others are the very nice little experiments and the practical summaries. Even if you have memorized your McGee and have read other good food science books such as `The Science of Cooking' by Bristol University (UK) don Peter Barham, I recommend Dr. Grosser's inexpensive little volume, especially if you have budding adolescent cooks under your wing.