Three Special Cookery Books
Plus some thoughts on culture and science in the context of cooking
If you were to ask my very personal opinion on what makes a good chef or cook, I would say—probably after much protracted daydreaming—that knowledge of the culture and science of food is as important as anything.
While we might not be aware of it, much of food culture and tradition is, in fact, shaped by science. Better put, much of what we eat was born out of humans' ingenious responses to the behaviour of the physical and natural world. Take salami, for example, or any of the myriad cured pork products that exist across cultures. These foods were created as a response to the degradation that transforms meat into bacteria-infested spoilage.
Humans, likely through happenchance, learnt that salt prevents rancidity, and hence delicious things like prosciutto, saucisson sec, lap cheong, naem, and nem chua were born. Back when foods like these were created, I doubt the civilisations that made them understood the scientific mechanisms at play. And whilst it might be easy to argue that learning that salt keeps harmful bacteria at bay isn't an advanced revelation - there are countless other examples of ancient cultures creating more ingenious food products in response to their specific environment. In his book In Defence of Food, Michael Pollan explains this with the example of corn.
In Latin America, corn is traditionally eaten with beans; each plant is deficient in an essential amino acid that tends to be abundant in the other, so together corn and beans form a balanced diet in the absence of meat. Similarly, corn in these countries is traditionally ground or soaked with limestone, which makes available a B vitamin in the corn, the absence of which would otherwise lead to the deficiency disease called pellagra.
As I said, examples like this abound throughout history. Soy is another such one. The soybean, by itself, is a terrible thing to eat. It contains an assortment of antinutrients that are detrimental to human health. It took the ancient cultures of Asia to figure out the complex ways it can be transformed into highly nutritious and digestible foods like tofu, tempeh, miso and soy sauce. Pre-industrial Mediterranean cultures practised cooking tomatoes with olive oil. Unbeknownst to them, combining olive oil with tomatoes and heat makes lycopene – a potent antioxidant – more readily available to us during the digestive process.
I find it remarkable that humans could arrive at such decisions and methods. If you think about these things long enough, metaphysical questions arise. For example, have corn and beans always represented a complete amino acid profile that is nutritious for humans, and somehow, primitive civilisations figured this out? Or, did the invisible hand of evolution somehow guide humans' nutritional requirements in response to the fact that corn and beans were once the only available foodstuffs?
Whatever the answer, it is clear that whereas once upon a time, our knowledge of the behaviours of the natural world was minimal, as time marches on and human civilisations get more advanced, our ability to understand these processes grows.
When it comes to cooking and making delicious food, understanding the cultural elements that shape food and the scientific processes at play when food is made is necessary. It's one thing to know that ceviche was a dish created to preserve fresh seafood in ancient times. It's another thing to understand that the acid in citrus juices denatures protein structures in the same way heat does. Having a working understanding of both is where creativity and mastery begin.
So having said all of this, I wanted to wrap up this piece with three of my all-time favourite cookery books—all of which somehow speak to this interrelationship between culture, science, and cooking.
The Art of Fermentation: An in-depth exploration of essential concepts and processes from around the world by Sandor Ellix Katz
This book was a revelatory for me. It highlighted the magical alchemy of food preservation and showed me that food can be an artist's canvas. In many ways, this book spurred my broader enthusiasm for cooking, explaining in simple terms why food was fermented in the first place, what biological forces are at play when we ferment food, and how we can create delicious ferments at home. It is a beautiful blend of scientific and cultural writing.
I remember reading a passage on mead (honey wine) with Katz recounting different variations he had encountered in his time, like the Polish pultorak or the Mayan (and Mexican) balché and offering a simple recipe one could make at home. I remember being astounded that an actual alcoholic beverage could be made at home by simply mixing honey with water and letting it sit for a while. When I attempted to make it myself, finally tasting the finished product that was effervescent, sweet, subtly sour and delicious I remember a feeling of pure joy came over me; joy at the mere process of creating something so simple but complex at the same time. Michael Pollan, in his foreword to the book captures its essence perfectly:
The Art of Fermentation is much more than a cookbook. Or rather, it is a cookbook in the same way the Zen and the Art of Archery is a how-to book aviout bows and arrows. Sure, it tells you how to do it, but much more important, it tells you what it means, and why an act as quotidian and practical as making your own sauerkraut repersents nothing less than engaging with the world.
McGee on Food & Cooking: An encyclopedia of kitchen science, history and culture by Harold McGee
I'm sure this book will go down in history as one of the canonical texts on cookery. It is incredibly dense, at a hefty 884 pages with ultra-small print. It covers everything related to food, eating, and cooking in the utmost depth—heavily weighted toward the scientific factors at play when we cook but also imbued with cultural and historical perspectives.
Many times, I have found myself referring to its index to find answers to obscure questions I've had that weren't easily answered by trawling the internet. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that this book is a much more reliable and easy-to-use resource than the Interwebz. Few things related to food and cooking aren't in here. And unlike the web, it's reliable. So many things I've picked up from this book, from learning about how collagen breaks down during the cooking process, to the optimal weight proportions for vegetable stocks, to the history and mechanisms behind dryageing, to how the calcium and magnesium in unrefined sea salt aids crispness in pickling. So many things; some foundational, some minute - all valuable. It is truly a fantastic fountain of knowledge.
Thai Food by David Thompson
No other book has had more of an impact on my journey as a cook than this one. It is a sprawling work that traverses the history of Thai food, the cultures that shaped and continue to shape it, and the traditions inherent to the cuisine. It contains 300-odd recipes ranging from classics like pad Thai, to more obscure regional dishes like pla meuk pad (stir-fried squid in its ink). It offers an exhaustive and descriptive list of classic Thai ingredients (again ranging from common things like lemongrass to the more mysterious condiments like pla raa). Above all, it beautifully addresses how and why Thai food came to be, whilst offering clear, tactical and practical explanations of how to cook dishes.
There are so many important things I've learnt from this book; it would be hard to list them all out here. A few that stood out are: learning that formal Thai meals are served with a clear categorisation of dishes into soups, curries, salads, relishes, and accompaniments or side dishes; or learning the technique and importance of 'cracking' (i.e. splitting coconut cream) when making coconut-based curries; or learning about the variances in regional cuisines of the nation - from the rustic North and North East, to the intricacies of the historical cuisines of the aristocracy, to the intensely spicy foods of the South. I also recall one particular passage in which Thompson lays out an exercise where one builds a typical salad dessing layer by layer (e.g. fish sauce, sugar, fish sauce, lime juice) tasting each layer before moving onto the next. Reading that excerpt and doing the exercise highlighted to me the subtlety of the melding of Thai flavours and how salt (fish sauce), acid (lime juice) and sugar interact with each other.
And harking back to my original argument on the interrelationship between culture and science - whilst this book is mainly weighted toward an articulation of the cultural elements at play in Thai cooking, as a masterful and talented chef, Thompson frequently explains why different cooking processes are employed and the mechanisms at play when they are - like why acidulated water helps with deep frying battered leaves, or how papaya contains enzymes that aid in the tenderisation of meat, or how freezing prawns denatures collagen structures and inhibits their ability to bind to one another when making classic Thai prawn cakes.
More than any other cookbook I've read this one contains the perfect balance of history, science, tradition, culture and cooking technique.
Where can I purchase the books