On Food and Cooking

and concrete, and have particular structures
that determine how they — and the foods
made out of them — behave in the kitchen.
The better we can visualize what they’re
like and what happens to them, the easier it
is to understand what happens in cooking.
And in cooking it’s generally a molecule’s
overall shape that matters, not the precise
placement of each atom. In most of the
drawings of molecules in this book, only
the overall shapes are shown, and they’re
represented in different ways — as long
thin lines, long thick lines, honeycomb-like
rings with some atoms indicated by letters
— depending on what behavior needs to be
explained. Many food molecules are built
from a backbone of interconnected carbon
atoms, with a few other kinds of atoms
(mainly hydrogen and oxygen) projecting
from the backbone. The carbon backbone is
what creates the overall structure, so often
it is drawn with no indications of the atoms