A visual feast

摘要

It took me 40 minutes to unpack Modernist Cuisine. The 6-volume, 2,400-page set of books by culinary experimenters Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young and Maxime Bilet weighs more than 20 kilograms and arrives wrapped in clean white paper and encased in a clear plastic box, from which each of the five main volumes can be retrieved: History and Fundamentals; Techniques and Equipment; Animals and Plants; Ingredients and Preparations; and Plated-Dish Recipes. The sixth volume, Kitchen Manual, is a simpler spiral-bound handbook intended for use in the kitchen, containing some 1,500 recipes referred to in the larger volumes. The care given to the packaging of this collection foreshadows the precision that went into its production. It is a masterwork filled with historical references and scientific explanations of why, for example, thickening liquids is important for taste, or why food browns during cooking. Nothing is left out, it seems.