“Cooking is not a perfectly precise art, but a good grasp of the basics gives the chef or student the ability not only to apply the technique, but also to learn the standards of quality so that they begin to develop a sense of how cooking works.”
-The Professional Chef (XV [emphasis mine])
No one learns by himself. All of us take from sources around us. Passively or proactively, we research. To make this journey — this kitchen time worthwhile, I’ve compiled a small reference library that I hope will help, that I hope will teach more than any cookbook might.
The Basics
There is something appealing about the imprecise. A comfort found in the recipe that asks you to “mix the cream and lemon juice, then season with sugar, salt, and pepper.” Such was the advice of The Basics by Filip Verheyden and Tony Le Duc when I let it fall open in my hands and discovered “Salad Dressing.” This is the sort of recipe I like. The kind of recipe that asks, as all fundamental understanding does, “Given what we know now, what else can be done?”
The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef’s Craft for Every Kitchen
The mark of every profession is a vocabulary. It’s what can make one an English professor, a journalist, a chemist, a janitor. A cook is no different. With each profession comes a shorthand, and I can think of no better, easier reference for this shorthand than Michael Ruhlman’s Elements of Cooking. I also admire the man’s consideration of eggs:
“My reverence for the egg borders on religious devotion. It is the perfect food–an inexpensive package, dense with nutrients and exquisitely flavored, that’s both easily and simply prepared but that is also capable of unmatched versatility in the kitchen. Yes, an egg is just an egg, but it is also ingredient, tool, and object, a natural construction of near mystical proportions.”
Elements of Cooking by Michael Ruhlman (22)
I know, too, from Elements of Cooking that Ruhlman always had a couple books close at hand when writing: The Professional Chef produced by the Culinary Institute of America and On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee.
The Professional Chef
The Professional Chef is a massive tome. I’ll be honest and say I’ve just gotten through the section on recipe conversions, but I’ve already learned much. Standardized recipes, for example.
I know I’ll never be a professional chef. I’m too old–my knees shot from years spent skateboarding–and too comfortable to work in a professional kitchen. It’s a good thing to understand, though. To know how food is put together. To become mindful of waste as if profits depend on it. To convert imperial to metric. To understand why weight, not volume, is the most precise measurement for ingredients. Plus, it already provided a wonderful quote, the singular impetus behind this new culinary journey. So there’s that.
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
No one serious about food should be without On Food and Cooking. It’s a book that explains why we should let meat rest after cooking, traces the origin of oregano, the importance of salt. In the pages of On Food and Cooking, McGee explains why cooked food tastes better than raw, and begins to explain the Maillard reaction before finally moving on, the number of individual chemical reactions making the up whole too numerous to detail.
The man can also write:
“What better subject for the first chapter than the food with which we all begin our lives?…A sip of milk itself or a scoop of ice cream can be a Proustian draft of youth’s innocence and energy and possibility, while a morsel of fine cheese is a rich meditation on maturity, the fulfillment of possibility, the way of all flesh.”
On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee (7-8)
Proust and ice cream? Beats a simple recipe every time.
