From The Atlantic: A quest for the beginner's best "meta-cookery" book. Thoughts?

[chromedome]

Read it here. 

[blue_dolphin]

Nice to read more good things about Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, as mentioned by @Anna N over here in this thread.  

I have or have read most of the other mentioned books and I agree none are perfectly suited to be the single key resource to truly teach a novice cook.

My copy of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat should arrive today and I'm looking forward to diving in.  

[Anna N]

42 minutes ago, blue_dolphin said:

Nice to read more good things about Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, as mentioned by @Anna N over here in this thread.  

I have or have read most of the other mentioned books and I agree none are perfectly suited to be the single key resource to truly teach a novice cook.

My copy of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat should arrive today and I'm looking forward to diving in.  

No! No!  Now I'll be trying to catch up with you on two (actually three) books!

 

 Edited to add:.  Try not to miss the subtle humour in the SFAH book.  Like the diagram showing you how to cut a carrot.   Big dice, small dice, no dice!   If my memory is correct.  

Edited April 26, 2017 by Anna N (log)

[JAZ]

Has anyone read the book Ingredient? It's been out for a while, but I just heard about it. From the "Look Inside" glance on Amazon, it seems to be what the author of the original article is looking for.

 

From the description: "There are ingredients, and then there are Ingredients. An ingredient is a tomato, a tortilla, or some tarragon. An Ingredient (with a capital "I") is a fundamental building block or recurring theme that works behind the scenes in everything we cook. There are millions of ingredients, but only eight Ingredients: Water, Sugars, Carbs, Lipids, Proteins, Minerals, Gases, and Heat.

Each Ingredient has its own personality, a set of things it does or doesn’t do. Ever been blown away by a wonderfully fragrant dish? From soup and mashed potatoes to French toast and barbecue, lipids act like glue to stick aromas to your food. Is a batter too thin or sauce not clinging correctly? The best bets for thickening any liquid are carbs and proteins, which we can find anywhere from a bag of flour to a roasted garlic clove or a piece of braised meat. This book teaches you the personalities of the Ingredients, where to find them, and how to put them to work.

Ingredient isn’t a book of recipes, nor is it a definitive treatise on the science of the kitchen. It’s an illustrated guide to visualizing and controlling food’s invisible moving parts, regardless of your skill level or how you like to cook."

[Dave the Cook]

It's surprising that the author of the article spent a year looking for the right book and didn't manage to stumble across Cookwise, I'm Just Here for the Food, Think Like a Chef, Techniques, Elements of Taste, or Cooking, just to name the few that come immediately to mind. Or maybe he did, and decided to use Bittman, Parsons and Alt-Lopez as straw men to make a pitch for Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. 

 

Which is fine. I've come to the conclusion that there's no reliable way to predict what sort of book/website/class will resonate with any particular person, At the same time, I'm in favor of anything that gets folks to cook. Having looked at the pages available in the Amazon preview, I can say that I don't find SFAH compelling (though the illustrations are pretty good), but if Anna does, that's great. Likewise, I really don't understand all the love for Ruhlman, but if he gets people to cook, I'll choke back my assessment that he's been trying to write the same book for seven years and falling short every time, and say "Awesome! Apply your new knowledge and go cook something!"

[kayb]

I love Cookwise. I credit it with starting me on my cooking journey out of my little corner of the world. That said, my very favorite meta-cookery book, simply for its breadth and never-fail instructions, is Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything.

 

[mcohen]

On ‎5‎/‎1‎/‎2017 at 2:10 PM, Dave the Cook said:

It's surprising that the author of the article spent a year looking for the right book and didn't manage to stumble across Cookwise, I'm Just Here for the Food, Think Like a Chef, Techniques, Elements of Taste, or Cooking, just to name the few that come immediately to mind. Or maybe he did, and decided to use Bittman, Parsons and Alt-Lopez as straw men to make a pitch for Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. 

 

 

 

I've read most of those books, and I can see why the author didn't recommend them either. The author doesn't name check every book, but I think its clear he's familiar with those books you listed.

 

Cookwise and I'm Just Here for the Food are probably the  books he writes about how McGee's "On Food and Cooking inspired a number of cooks and cookbook authors to integrate scientific approaches into their practices, and some of them have produced cookbooks that read as more populist versions of McGee’s book."

 

Techniques and Cooking fall into the  "in-depth guides to mastering the fundamentals of a classically respected cuisine (most often French or Italian) or matter-of-fact catalogues of cooking techniques" books that the author mentions.