On Food and Cooking

"Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking, which was his first book – and for me the second cookbook I got into, after Jacques Pépin. Pépin goes into what he’s learned when he’s creating the French classics. He breaks it down into very straightforward steps. But McGee begins to question those steps – so, for example, he looks at the science of making a mayonnaise, and how much egg yolk you need to make a certain amount. The rule of thumb was that you needed one yolk for every half-litre of oil or so. But McGee worked out that purely from an emulsification point of view, that you could emulsify something like ten litres with a single yolk, and actually the rest was just about taste. He was very logical. He found whenever he fried things his glasses got covered in oil, but on the inside , because the oil was going up into the air and coming down as a mist. So he wore a peaked baseball cap when he was frying, and that sorted it out. Yes. We try to think logically. How do you make a meatball tender enough to crumble in your mouth, but still give it a firm bite? It’s all about the ratio of meat to fat to couscous in the meatball. It’s totally scientific. At Leon we’re always looking at the science of things."

"I don’t give quotes to cookbooks any more but I gave one to Harold because he doesn’t have recipes, he has techniques and science, so I made an exception. If there’s one book that everybody should get it’s this book. He explains how cooking works and gives you the freedom to create your own things, to know when things go wrong, and he references other people’s books. He’s a wonderful true scientific writer and not dull. Well, he would describe the differences between bleached and unbleached flour or, say I wanted to substitute honey for sugar, he would explain the differences in the way it performs and how much liquid there is in the honey. That’s just an example. He doesn’t just stick to baking. He tells you what you need to know about cooking veal and how to keep it from getting tough or dry. It’s common sense basic things and every serious food writer refers to his book. Well, last night, I made a banana cake with a combination of oil and butter to see what would happen. Yesterday I thought it was too moist because butter has water in it and I didn’t account for that, thinking it would be good to have it more moist, but today it’s heaven and I’m thrilled! There’s bananas, crème fraiche, and I used my oil cake recipe but with butter as part of the oil. The reason I did an oil cake with banana is that a lot of people like to use cream cheese frosting and then it needs to be refrigerated and a butter cake is like cardboard when it’s cold, but with oil you can eat it straight from the refrigerator. Now my assistant in Minnesota is going to try with sour cream. Tonight I’m going to our country place in New Jersey and we’ll arrive late so I always have things in the freezer that I made recently so it’s a beef and barley soupless. It’s classic beef and barley soup but concentrated so there’s no soup in it. Like a pilaf. And guess what else I’m making with it! I found two gigantic puffballs so I’m going to sauté them and also the last of my neighbour’s tomatoes. I made a terrible mistake yesterday that I’ve never done before. I was oven-drying the last of the season’s cherry tomatoes and I went out to a party at Di Paolo, the best Italian place here in Little Italy, and completely forgot them so I made tomato briquettes! I was heartbroken."

"Yes. This is the book that I use when I need to come up with a very technical solution to what I am making. Cooking can be very intuitive, but, especially with food writing, you often need to get to grips with what it is that you are actually doing, so that you can have a deeper understanding of it. This is a very technical manual. Let’s say that I need to see what happens during the process of steaming, or poaching, or frying; I always go to this book. McGee is very clear and to the point. Despite the fact that he is quite technical, it’s never boring. I got this book as a present from a good friend of mine a few years ago. It is a sort of a classic. It is the most immediate reference book that many chefs go to when they need to know something technical. For example, Heston Blumenthal is quoted on the cover, as are a few other big-name chefs. There are a lot of chemistry and scientific details involved, which I like."