[.ca] What Einstein Told His Cook (ISBN 0393011836)

From Amazon.com:
Why do recipes call for unsalted butter--and salt? What is a microwave, actually? Are smoked foods raw or cooked? Robert L. Wolke's enlightening and entertaining What Einstein Told His Cook offers answers to these and 127 other questions about everyday kitchen phenomena. Using humor (dubious puns included), Wolke, a bona fide chemistry professor and syndicated Washington Post columnist, has found a way to make his explanations clear and accessible to all: in short, fun. For example, to a query about why cookbooks advise against inserting meat thermometers so that they touch a bone, Wolke says, "I hate warnings without explanations, don't you? Whenever I see an 'open other end' warning on a box, I open the wrong end just to see what will happen. I'm still alive." But he always finally gets down to brass tacks: as most heat transfer in meat is due to its water content, areas around bone remain relatively cool and thus unreliable for gauging overall meat temperature. Organized into basic categories like "Sweet Talk" (questions involving sugar), "Fire and Ice" (we learn why water boils and freezers burn, among other things), and "Tools and Technology" (the best kind of frying pan, for example), the book also provides illustrative recipes like Black Raspberry Coffee Cake (to demonstrate how metrics work in recipes) and Bob's Mahogany Game Hens (showing what brining can do). With technical illustrations, tips, and more, the book offers abundant evidence that learning the whys and hows of cooking can help us enjoy the culinary process almost as much as its results. --Arthur Boehm

You can do Better:
If you're interested in kitchen science, chances are you're not stupid, so why buy a book that treats you as if you were? The Q & A format means the book can't fully develop a satisfactory explanation; it also reads like a collection of magazine columns. Any explanation that sounds even vaguely technical is covered in as few words as possible, sequestered in parentheses and prefaced with the irritating word "techspeak". This does nothing for the book's already patronizing air. If you're a thinking cook who has taken High School chemistry, you'll be better off with Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking, an acessible classic that is used as a textbook at the Culinary Institute of America--a distinction this book will never claim. This book will serve admirably as an introduction to food science--for your nearest reasonably bright 7th grader.

Entertaining, Accurate Application of Science to Cooking:
This book is about what science can tell us about working with food. It is one answer to my wish that every TV chef who is attempting to teach cooking to us foodies take a two semester course in chemistry. The book is not a rigorous approach to the chemistry of sugars, salt, fats, chemical leavenings, heat, acids, bases, and the like. Rather, it is a collection of enhanced answers to questions posed to the author in a regular newspaper column. This makes the book more interesting to read, if a little less available as a resource to applying its teachings to new situations. The second chapter on salt is a perfect example of the kind of misunderstandings this book clears up. More than one TV chef (and more than one cookbook author) has spoken at great length about differences in salt, giving one the impression that there is a basic difference between table salt, kosher salt, and sea salt. There is, of course, a difference, but that difference is based almost entirely on the physical differences, akin to the difference between liquid and frozen water. All salt is sodium chloride. By weight, no type of salt gives a saltier result than another. The very small additional differences between, say, kosher salt and sea salt are in the presence of incredibly small quantities minerals in addition to sodium chloride. Even differences in taste may be due to the differences in physical form. I have a sense that these considerations may be just a little too subtle to be worth all this fuss. I'm inclined to agree, until it occurs to me that if someone hears a statement that 'kosher salt' is less salty than table salt, they may use this as a reason to use more kosher salt and ignore the evidence of their senses that they are indeed eating a lot of salt. This becomes significant if one must lower their intake of sodium chloride. This book addresses many such confusions, and addresses them accurately and persuasively. It does this so well that Alton Brown wishes he would have written this book. My suggestion to Alton Brown is that with the lesson of this book, he would be able to do a better job of it. I may be stepping on an intellectual land mine here since I have not yet read Shirley Corriher's book 'Cookwise' so I do not know if she has already been over this territory, but here goes. I think the definitive book on food science for the masses has not been written yet. This book covers many of the right topics and I found no inaccuracies in the science. But, the book suffers from being a collection of edited columns. Science is about theories explaining facts. For example, a full explanation of salt would involve a discussion of what a salt is, in general, and use this information to show, among other things, why salt is dangerous to people with hypertension and how chemicals other than table salt can influence body fluid volume in hypertensives. A scientific discussion would extend the notion of salts to what it means to dissolve a salt in water. By doing so, it would clear up the most seriously abused work in cooking explanations. That word is 'dissolve' and it's various past, past perfect and pluperfect tenses. Almost every culinary demonstrator on TV and many writers in cookbooks misuse the term dissolve by applying it to the very different operations of creating an emulsion, melting, and creating a colloid. I think what I am really recommending as some future Alton Brown project is a book that combines physics, chemistry, and physiology to give an UNDERSTANDING of food, cooking, and health. Understanding is the real goal of science, so that one can apply what one knows in one situation to cooking food in other situations. Strange as it may seem, this is an almost perfect characterization of what Herr Brown believes he is doing. The subtitle of this book, 'Kitchen Science Explained' is a perfect representation of how this book is not science itself, but the carrying of science to the 'gentiles'. In itself, the title is a redundancy, since science itself is explanation incarnate. This is a very good book. I found no errors (I was a professional chemist, so I would probably have found really bad errors if there were any) in science. I believe the writing is lucid and entertaining. I believe the author is always intellectually honest in saying when either he does not know the answer or if science in general does not yet have an explanation. The only point of my ranting is that this is not the ideal book on food science which bridges the gap between the research of Harold McGee and the practical worlds of Alton Brown and Shirley Corriher. A book that comes a lot closer to this goal is McGee's book, 'The Curious Cook'. I recommend this book to anyone with any curiosity about food. Excellent reading even if you don't cook.

Kitchen Commentary on Chemistry:
This book reads like more like a conversation, or informal lecture than like a textbook or even a cookbook. The author follows a basic cookbook and textbook rule by splitting his subject matter into small and distinct chapters. If you're looking for a cookbook, look elsewhere. This book has some, but they can be found elsewhere. They're used here to expound upon the subject matter of the particular chapter in which they appear. If you're looking for hardcore science look elsewhere, this book is written for the chemistry layman (it includes little techspeak terms most of which you should already know from high school chemistry.) If you're a serious foody you probably already know a great deal of whats in this book. But if you're the average person looking for a good read or a basic food chemistry education this book is perfect. The author dispells many modern food myths, and teaches basic food science.

Delicious Brew of Cooking and Chemistry:
This book looks at some of the main issues (and ingredients) relating to food and cooking from the perspective of science. The author, chemistry professor and popular food writer, explores some of the more 'controversial' ingredients such as sugar, salt, fat, and other chemicals used in the kitchen and their known effects on us. He also answers (or at least makes a good attempt to answer) some of the nagging questions about food and its preparation, such as microwave issues and MSG. Lots of not-always-useful-but-interesting tidbits (pardon the pun) are also thrown in, like the answers to "can eggs be frozen?" or even "what do you do with the wine cork when the waiter gives it to you?" to spice things up. While the explanations in the book are scientific and accurate, they are written in an accessible and entertaining way. Minimal chemistry knowledge is required. A great book for anyone who eats. Better still for anyone who cooks.

Excellent Kitchen Reference:
Howard Hillman's "Kitchen Science" and Robert Wolke's "What Einstein Told His Cook" are two books of largely similar information. Their titles foreshadow their different writing styles. Both are very informative and worthy of keeping as a reference. Hillman uses a question and answer format and is direct and succinct. Wolke also uses the question/answer format, but he has more lively style, and the lengthier answers are rendered with much wit and humor. For the efficiency-mined reader, Hillman's book gives more bang. Wolke's book gives more reading pleasure. Interestingly, they sometimes disagree. Hillman says that most alcohol added to dishes while cooking is lost due to evaporation, while Wolke maintains, with a more nuanced explanation, that the anywhere from 4 to 49 % of the added alcohol might remain... Take your pick. I enjoyed both.