A few years ago, my (now ex-) boyfriend bought me a copy of Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. For years, I never cracked it open, mostly because he was always smug in his confidence that I would like it, and I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of being right. It's small wonder that our rocky relationship eventually sputtered to a merciful end a year later.
It wasn't until I was moving a couple months ago that I unearthed my copy of McGee again. I had always heard good things about it-- my current roommate TAed a food science class where On Food and Cooking was the primary text, and she found it so riveting that she squirreled away a copy at the end of the quarter. So with some trepidation, I finally opened the book.
My goodness.
It's seriously one of the most fascinating books I've ever read in my life (and I'm glad my ex isn't around to hear me admit it). For the first time in my life, I finally understood the whys and hows of cooking. For the first time, I thought to myself, "Hey, if I actually learned why I was doing the things each recipe called for, I might actually figure out how to cook!"
Being the nerd I am, I desperately want to tell everyone about the things I'm learning, and I want to ask the questions that no one really thinks about when they're pulling out a recipe. And because I have a computer, I want to foist that upon the world, readers or not.
So here I am, with two of my favorite books: McGee in one arm, and the evergreen classic in the other, Irma Rombauer's The Joy of Cooking (75th Ed). Here's to hoping I learn something.
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