On Food and Cooking

the other food molecules.
Fats, oils, and their chemical relatives
are water’s antagonists. Like water,
they’re a component of living things and
of foods, and they’re also a cooking
medium. But their chemical nature is
very different — so different that they
can’t mix with water. Living things put
this incompatibility to work by using
fatty materials to contain the watery
contents of cells. Cooks put this quality
to work when they fry foods to crisp and
brown them, and when they thicken
sauces with microscopic but intact fat
droplets. Fats also carry aromas, and
produce them.
Carbohydrates, the specialty of plants,
include sugars, starch, cellulose, and
pectic substances. They generally mix
freely with water. Sugars give many of
our foods flavor, while starch and the
cell-wall carbohydrates provide bulk and