On Food and Cooking

Kitchen.
As I finished, I realized that cooks more
serious than my friends and I might be
skeptical about the relevance of cells and
molecules to their craft. So I spent much of
the introduction trying to bolster my case. I
began by quoting an unlikely trio of
authorities, Plato, Samuel Johnson, and Jean
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, all of whom
suggested that cooking deserves detailed and
serious study. I pointed out that a 19th century
German chemist still influences how many
people think about cooking meat, and that
around the turn of the 20th century, Fannie
Farmer began her cookbook with what she
called “condensed scientific knowledge”
about ingredients. I noted a couple of errors in
modern cookbooks by Madeleine Kamman
and Julia Child, who were ahead of their time
in taking chemistry seriously. And I proposed
that science can make cooking more
interesting by connecting it with the basic