http://www.opinionjournal.com/weekend/fivebest/?id=110007441
FIVE BEST
Thought for Food
Before you head into the kitchen, read these books.
BY RAYMOND SOKOLOV
Saturday, October 22, 2005 12:00 a.m.
1. "Mastering the Art Of French Cooking, Vol. 1" by Julia Child,
Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck (Knopf, 1961).
This overly meticulous and slightly dated introduction to la cuisine
frangaise is still the indispensable text for the cook who has learned
the basics and wants to move on to the classic dishes of the world's
greatest national food repertoire. By now, "Mastering" is also a
historical document, the book that launched the American food
revolution. It was based in part on an even greater primer, soon to
appear in English, "La Cuisine de Madame Saint-Ange." But for neophytes,
nothing will replace Julia.
2. "The Oxford Companion to Food" by Alan Davidson (Oxford, 1999).
From aardvark (tastes "like pork") to zucchini, this stupendous
encyclopedia is almost entirely the work of one eccentric Scot, who
retired as Her Majesty's ambassador to the Court of the White Elephant
(Laos) to spawn an international coven of food historians through the
Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. As one of his acolytes (and a very
minor contributor to this tome), I hope I may be forgiven for calling it
the single essential reference work on food.
3. "On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen" by Harold
McGee (Scribner, 2004).
C.E. (Engine Charlie) Wilson, head of General Motors and defense
secretary under President Eisenhower, once dismissed scientific research
as an activity that explains why grass is green and fried potatoes turn
brown in the pan. He didn't know the half of it. Harold McGee devotes
several pellucid pages to the chemistry of browning and why it has
helped fast food and three-star chefs alike to addict the world to
fries. Mr. McGee is the go-to guru for answers to such kitchen questions
as why vaporized grease collects only on the inside of eyeglasses or why
Chinese cooks cook meat in soy sauce combined with star anise and onions
("the production of sulfur-phenolic aromatics . . . intensify the
meatiness of the dish").
4. "Land of Plenty" by Fuchsia Dunlop (Norton, 2001).
The pinnacle of Chinese cuisine is the not-always-chilified food of
Sichuan Province. In preparation for her exhaustive cookbook, Ms.
Dunlop, a British broadcaster fluent in Chinese, studied at the Sichuan
Institute of Higher Cuisine at Chengdu. Classics such as dry-fried
slivered beef are all here, as well as recherchi items: rabbit with rock
sugar. The author's learning is deep. She can tell you the Chinese name
for the carp favored for a fish stew made in an earthen pot (ya yu). And
she is a dab hand at English, too. In a bamboo recipe, she rhapsodizes
about southern Sichuan: "The bamboo grows lavishly and intensely green,
arching over isolated farmhouses. . . . Everything is damp and
moss-grown, moist and oozing."
5. "The Art of Eating" by M.F.K. Fisher (Macmillan, 1954).
A bit witchy, a bit bitchy and a snob all the way through, Mary Frances
Kennedy Fisher took food and transformed it with the alchemy of style
into a serial autobiography of high literary distinction told from the
vantage point of the kitchen or the table. The meals, so well described,
are talismans salvaged from a reckless, selfish life. "On a hot day,"
she reflected once, "it is easiest to think back to such things as
silver-green mint juleps, or the smooth golden taste of cold papaya on a
freighter near Guatemala, or a crisp lettuce anywhere." Her models were
the best. On fruit, she quotes from Keats in a letter to a friend:
"Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand and with
the other holding in my mouth a Nectarine--good God how fine. It went
down soft pulpy, slushy, oozy--all its delicious embonpoint melted down
my throat like a large beatified Strawberry. I shall certainly breed."