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The Science of Cooking by Peter Barham Springer, Berlin, 2001. 252 pp. $34.95, 19.95. ISBN 3-540-67466-7.
NOTA BENE: FOOD SCIENCE
The Kitchen Chemist
When the dough spilled out of the bread machine and threatened to take over the kitchen, it proved to be a simple matter to diagnose what had gone wrong. As I was told how the dough had been prepared, I realized that the recipe must have had a typo. It had called for two tablespoons of yeast instead of two teaspoons. Although this mistake was easy to spot, many kitchen disasters are much more difficult to understand.
Helping cooks figure out what might have gone wrong and increasing the chances that recipes turn out as planned are at the heart of Peter Barham's The Science of Cooking.
A physicist at Bristol University, Barham combines a love of science with a passion for cooking (and food) into this small and enjoyable book. Although chemistry is not a topic that everyone enjoys learning and thermodynamics tends...