I have just started volume 2 of this 6-volume juggernaut of culinary publishing, but I can't restrain myself any longer. This is an absolute tour-de-force of cookery. By the way, if your eyes bug out when you see the price of the set, it's not surprising; each volume is enormous. I'm borrowing them through interlibrary loan.

These books are Kindle killers. When you flip the pages of one of these behemoths, the very notion of an e-book edition will make you double over in laughter. They sport huge lush color photographs covered in delicate annotations, totally illegible on any computing display smaller than a wall. These books lay bare the physics and chemistry of cooking in the most practical and comprehensible terms. Hardly surprising given that the main author is none other than - wait for it - Nathan Myhrvold, chief technologist for Microsoft and also trained master chef (there really may be nothing that guy cannot do). Therefore it starts from basics, i.e., the invention of fire. The first volume barely makes it past the topic of food-borne pathogens.

I was already a fan of O'Reilly's Cooking for Geeks, but this series is the ne plus ultra of the genre. It is already lighting a fire under my expertise in the kitchen. If you cook, take a look. If you love someone who cooks and your budget can withstand the strain, this would make a helluva Christmas gift.

About 10 years ago, at a Gathering for [Martin] Gardner, I got to see Myhrvold speak. Among other topics, he went over the idea that dinosaurs could crack their tails like whips, creating a sonic boom. Fascinating stuff.

So, being a fan of cooking, I went to look this up. I'm assuming it's Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, since the author matches?

Hefty price indeed.

Sounds marvelous! The only thing I recall reading about these books before was an article on "The Perfect Hamburger." IIRC the ingredients cost about $100.

I am more and more excited as I read on. I just learned the physics of baking and how humidity is the dominant factor and why preheating is important. It's devoted separate chapters to boiling, sautéing, broiling, roasting, pot roasting, frying, ... I mean, the level of detail is astounding. Cutaway photographs of pots with annotations showing the different heating zones and what's going on. Mere recipe books are faint shadows in comparison with this painstaking treatise of the science. This makes it far easier to create and modify recipes of our own instead of depending on ones written by other people.

*Damn*. I looked at the price -- over $800! But this sounds like a *wonderful* series of books that I'd love. (I enjoy cooking, am pretty good at it.) I might just start saving mad money and get it after I've funded the Heinlein Collection. <G>

ATK/Cook's has been doing this for years, if a bit less systematically. All of their main recipe articles include sidebars on the science and technology of why one technique works and another doesn't. A subscription to Cook's online might be a cheap alternative to putting this behemoth on your shelf.

I think that both might be worth having. <G> Thanks for the pointer to Cooks online -- I'll check it out.

I rather like behemoths, though, when the behemoth in question is *books*. So I think I'll put this book set on my "mad money" wish list as well, and see if I can accumulate that much mad money.

As part of my vocation, I go through about five self-help and management process books a week (it's ridiculous how fast they're being written). Even though they're nonfiction, there are very few that are worth keeping. Usually I take a single action item or maybe copy a page at the most, otherwise it's just a matter of assimilating the message and moving on. Then there's the nonfiction that's just there for casual enjoyment, like the recent bestseller about a WWII plane crash in New Guinea - Shangri-La. Fascinating read, no need to ever revisit. Wouldn't want that cluttering the shelves.

You guys here are the only ones who've acknowledged the existence of libraries. I just find that everyone else I talk to in the US equates book acquisition with Amazon. Many of them say, "Oh, but I use Kindle, it's so much cheaper." Uh-huh, but their $0.99 per unit is still more than my $0.00. And they're invariably smug about their Kindle smartness.

Might be a California thing too, the people I talk to are mostly in L.A.. Although I did recall the Glendale Central Library as being quite good when I was there. But I bring up the idea of the library and they look at me like I'm speaking in tongues.

Dittoes--I go to the library every four weeks (That's check-out time here. It was only two weeks when I was a kid, are people slower now? ) with my son and check out an armload of books for each of us. Mostly, history, biography and "self-help" for me. Like Peter says, extract the knowledge, free! It's a beautiful thing.

The Kindle is interesting; I got a Fire for Christmas last year and have only purchased three books on it, and almost zero movies (a couple for airplane trips). I mostly use it for internet and email. Amazon has not made their money back on me, yet.

Yes, this set of books, rather like the Heinlein biography, are of the category that you would want them on your shelf, for life. And listed in your will so that the heirs don't fight over it.

Okay, I have now finished volume 2, and, um, Holy Cow. After the painstaking explanations of the physics and chemistry of every way of heating, chilling, drying, and concentrating food known to man, it rapidly segues into some methods not known to most men. This is the 'modernist' part; the intersection of cooking with rocket science. They consider vacuum pumps essential equipment. They wax rhapsodic about a machine that combines a centrifuge, vacuum, and freeze drier - saves counter space. They devote many pages to Mission Impossible-type food preparation methods, like making powdered mushroom. Several recipes call for liquid nitrogen.

Yet, I wish I had access to some of this equipment. The book makes a compelling case for how some of its techniques will result in flavors simply unachievable through conventional means, and I would like to try the results of, say, cooking sous vide or vacuum concentrating.

It seems to me that a canteen of the kind used in backpacking would be both far stronger under pressure and have the wide mouth you want, e.g.:

The screw top lid should be good to at least a couple atmospheres, I'm thinking.

Just finished volume 4. It's remarkable how this work combines thorough culinary research with outrageous excursions in industrial food chemistry. When I first saw the title I thought "Modern... cool, a fresh approach to the tired old Julia Childs territory." I wasn't thinking what "modernist" means. So while there's a 2-page spread on what happens to eggs at a dozen different temperatures, there are also bizarre recipes like Melon Caviar, Pistachio Cream (non-dairy), Bacon Jam, and many other odd juxtapositions that can be achieved when your kitchen is populated with devices like rotor-stator agitators, vacuum dessicators, and liquid nitrogen (which is handy for peeling boiled eggs, apparently). And many ingredients that come only in packaging more appropriate to a research lab.

I'd like to experience some of those concoctions some time, because it's evident that they have no parallel in conventional cuisine, but someone else is going to have to make them because I'm not about to take out a mortgage to outfit our kitchen with a cryogenic centrifuge. Or to take the time required to create one of these exquisite works of art. (The perfect boiled egg requires two sous-vide heating phases and a blowtorch. The perfect fried egg requires separating the yolk and white and heating them independently before recombining them.) Maybe I'll make it into one of these restaurants some day. I can't shake the impression that this field was developed by bored and hungry grad students waiting for experiments to conclude late at night in the lab.

Regardless of whether you're ever going to make any of these recipes, the books are a feast for the eyes. They spare no expense in, say, slicing many things in half (from a soufflé to a whipped cream siphon) to expose the innards. Simply gorgeous photography, quite aside from the mind-expanding recipes.

Saw a television special on him and the books just days ago. Lots of footage of the crew hacksawing things in cross section...