1. History & Fundamentals

A rev­o­lu­tion is under­way in the art of cook­ing. Just as Nouvelle cui­sine upended cen­turies of tra­di­tions and revealed to a delighted world the joys of inno­vat­ing in the kitchen, Modernist cui­sine has in recent years blown through the bound­aries of the culi­nary arts. Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young, and Maxime Bilet—scientists, inven­tors, and accom­plished cooks in their own right—have cre­ated the ulti­mate guide to this move­ment that embraces high-tech and science-inspired tech­niques for prepar­ing food that ranges from the oth­er­worldly to the sublime.

Volume 1 begins with a his­tor­i­cal sur­vey that places the emer­gence of the Modernist cook­ing move­ment in its proper con­text, as just the lat­est in a series of trans­for­ma­tional shifts in the culi­nary arts. The vol­ume con­tin­ues with a prac­ti­cal and author­i­ta­tive walk through the basic biol­ogy of food­borne ill­nesses, how they spread, and how care­ful cooks can exploit the lat­est slow-cooking tech­niques with­out putting them­selves or their guests at risk. Next, a provoca­tive chap­ter on food and health exam­ines many of the most com­mon beliefs about what we should and should not eat to stay healthy—and finds dis­ap­point­ingly few that have sur­vived care­ful scrutiny by the sci­en­tific community.

The vol­ume con­cludes with two chap­ters that every cook should read to under­stand the two most fun­da­men­tal ingre­di­ents of all cook­ing: heat and water. In the kitchen, we use these every day, in every dish. Yet even the most expe­ri­enced cooks find them­selves occa­sion­ally frus­trated or bewil­dered by the unex­pected ways in which heat moves into and through foods, and by the gen­uinely odd chem­i­cal and phys­i­cal prop­er­ties of water.

Written explic­itly for cooks, these chap­ters present the fun­da­men­tal sci­ence every culi­nary enthu­si­ast should mas­ter. The engag­ing writ­ing and highly illus­trated for­mat bring the sub­jects to life.