The why and how of what’s cooking in the kitchen
At least once a month, usually in the middle of a meal, a call goes out from one of the diners, “Get Harold McGee!” It is not the actual Harold McGee we are after – although it would be wonderful if he materialized at our breakfast table to solve a controversy about the Scoville scale or why Graham crackers were considered a godly snack. What we are summoning is On Food and Cooking: the Science and Lore of the Kitchen McGee’s fantastically quirky compendium of culinary science and a lovingly humorous exploration of the human relationship to what and how we eat.
There are two editions of On Food and Cooking, and while the most recent one is more authoritative, comprehensive and better organized, I still love the original. My copy of the big blue paperback is well used and its spine brittle. I read it chapter by chapter in graduate school, an absorbing antidote to all those scientific papers. But not, of course, antithetical to them. McGee did not train formally as a scientist, but he is one. The book takes us into the biology, chemistry and physics of food composition, cooking, and nutrition, as well as into the physiology and psychology of taste, food preferences and food biases. But as much or more than he is a scientist, McGee is a writer. A writer who can lay out the steps in the Mallard reaction or explain how an emulsion forms in direct, clear prose that more scientists should strive to emulate. I have used his essay from the New York Times on ice-cream to teach my students how to explain the logic of experimentation accurately and lucidly without jargon or pretense. I go back to this book again and again for the pleasure of his style, and to be swept along by his excitement for exploring the natural world.
McGee’s thesis in English literature was entitled: Keats and the Progress of Taste. But it was not about the kind of taste you might imagine.
The first edition of On Food and Cooking was published in 1984, six years after McGee finished his PhD in English at Yale. Such a book is not written in a day (or for most of us in a lifetime), so the work must have begun much earlier. In the Introduction to the second edition he describes discovering the scientific literature on cooking as a diversion from work on his thesis (and in response to a friend’s queries about beans and flatulence). But the depth, expanse and richness of the information and scholarship he brought together is not the work of an amateur. In the same year that it appeared, McGee published a paper in the journal Nature describing experiments verifying received culinary wisdom that that egg whites foam more quickly and are more stable when beaten in a copper bowl. Publishing a paper in Nature is the life dream of many scientists. Publishing a paper in Nature when your most recent degree is English literature would seem like a mad hallucination. This was not McGee’s last scientific paper, and certainly not his last set of experiments.
The path he took to his life’s work in some ways resembles that of Charles Darwin, or other 19th century scientists whose profession careers were propelled by unrestrained curiosity and constant exploration rather than formal training. Under pressure from his father, Darwin first studied to be a doctor and then an Anglican minister. Showing little interest in either career, he preferred instead to collect beetles or practice taxidermy. Non-regulation scientific interests won out when he seized the opportunity to sail with the Beagle for what became a five-year voyage during which he collected the specimens and experience that became the foundation of his ideas.
It is unlikely that McGee felt pressured to switch from a degree in astronomy to one in English, or to pursue a PhD in literature, but his varied experience broadens his thinking. His thesis traces how the representation of beauty evolves in the work of John Keats, one of the most famous romantic poets. He describes the progress of Keats’ “taste,” which transforms from an immediate and greedy sensuality to a more considered experience of beauty in the context of sorrow and difficulty. According to McGee, many writers and critics believed that for a poet to be truly great, they had to escape from mere idolatrous beauty to achieve a more abstract and godly sublime. But Keats, he says, never entirely gave up on beauty or its individual and social pleasures.
“An understanding of what food is and how it works does no violence to the art of cuisine …”
McGee has something in common with Keats, and with Darwin, in that he conveys a pervasive sense of astonished and active joy in the beauty of food and science. At the same time, he does not shy away from the complexity of our relationship with food, as well as the facts and sometimes violence of how it comes to our tables. He describes the process of slaughtering meat, worries about the effects of additives and weighs the advantages and disadvantages of modern farming. As Darwin feared that his theories would undermine conventional religious beliefs, McGee understands the anxiety that science will snatch the mystery from art. He says, “An understanding of what food is and how it works does no violence to the art of cuisine, destroys no delightful mystery. Instead that mystery expands from matters of expertise and taste to encompass the hidden patterns and wonderful coincidences of nature.”
This echoes the famous passage at the end of The Origin of Species, where Darwin says, “There is grandeur in this view of life … from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” This, for me, is part of the message of McGee’s book: From the simple, but incredibly diverse foodstuffs available in nature endless forms can be created that bring us beauty and pleasure. And when we savour them it deepens our appreciation of the variety of life and experience.