Harold McGee, Keys to Good Cooking and Kokumi
You may know Harold McGee as the father of modern food science, or maybe as the Curious Cook in New York Times columns on how to make better bread with less kneading or why some of us detest cilantro. As a food writer, I admire him for those things too. But we share this weird Gilligan’s Island-like bond, since we were marooned together along with a group of foodies at the American Chemical Society estate in Baltimore on Sept. 11, 2001. So when I saw that McGee would be talking about his new book Keys to Good Cooking: A Guide to Making the Best of Food & Recipes at Omnivore Books in San Francisco’s Noe Valley, I decided to drop by. He told a packed room he set out to be an astronomer and ended up as a gastronomer after getting to cherry- pick the science classes he wanted at…
November 2, 2010