Building Your Cookbook Shelf: Food Science
There's much to be said for cookbooks that cover the basics, but there's more to good food than simply following a recipe. Understanding the science behind a recipe can make it easier to adjust on the fly based on the ingredients you have available, correct and pivot when things go wrong mid-recipe or make up an entirely new-to-you dish based on your diet and food preferences.
We highlighted America's Test Kitchen and the Cook's Illustrated Cookbook in a recent column, and it's worth mentioning them both here again. ATK takes an evidence-based approach to food and cooking; Test Kitchen staff will test every variation of a recipe they can before determining what method is best. The Cook's Illustrated Cookbook is a handy guide for anyone who wonders how the same cookie dough recipe, say, can result in crunchy or chewy cookies, depending on the day.
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, a one-time editor of the Cook's Illustrated magazine, brings this same scientific approach to food in his stellar book The Food Lab. "Once you understand the basic science of how and why a recipe works, you suddenly find that you've freed yourself from the shackles of recipes," he writes. The Food Lab is a reflection of that philosophy: while Lopez-Alt does offer recipes, they are written to encourage home chefs to experiment on their own. Samin Nosrat's Salt Fat Acid Heat starts from a similar point, providing practical advice for mastering the "elements of good cooking," as she calls them, to create any type of dish.
While Julia Turshen's Small Victories is not about food science, per se, the recipes collected within are an invitation to play with traditional dishes: each recipe includes suggestions for small, simple shifts that can be applied to transform the original dish into something entirely new, as well as a nod to the "small victory" to be learned in its making. That learning--and those victories, be they large or small--is, after all, what makes time in the kitchen the enjoyment that it is. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm
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Trinity Avenue, where Fi's house is located, seems like a place you know well--a realistic portrait of an upwardly mobile suburban London street. Is it based on an actual street where you live or have lived?
Russian author, dissident and former exile Vladimir Voinovich died on July 27 at age 85. He is best known for The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, a sort of Soviet Catch-22 about the Red Army during World War II. Voinovich was born in what is now Tajikistan to a father who was sentenced to five years in labor camps for anti-Soviet agitation. Voinovich published Ivan Chonkin in two parts between 1969 and 1971 and, within a few years, his writing was banned in the Soviet Union, spreading instead through samizdat and Western outlets. By 1980, after a campaign of harassment, Voinovich was forced to emigrate and was stripped of his citizenship. He settled in Munich, West Germany, where he wrote the dystopian satire Moscow 2042. Voinovich was able to return to Russia when Mikhail Gorbachev restored his citizenship in 1990. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Voinovich was a vocal critic of reemerging totalitarianism under Vladimir Putin.
