On Food and Cooking

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

One of the most comprehensive and scientific books on cooking available. All the foods and their origins, their etymology and their scientific composition, are discussed. A stunningly through work, it gives the reader a lot of knowledge on the subject of food.

🎨 Impressions

It was quite a book to get through. I quite liked the etymology of the words; very interesting.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• Whenever we cook we become practical chemists, drawing on the accumulated knowledge of generations, and transforming what the Earth offers us into more concentrated forms of pleasure and nourishment.

• Began the gradual decline of the horses and the expansion of the deer family, the ruminants, which evolved the ability to survive on dry grass. Cattle, sheep, goats, and their relatives are all ruminants.

• The key to the rise of the ruminants is their highly specialized, multichamber stomach, which accounts for a fifth of their body weight and houses trillions of fiber-digesting microbes, most of them in the first chamber, or rumen.

• The immediate ancestor of Bos taurus, the common dairy cow, was Bos primigenius, the long-horned wild aurochs.

• Most traditional cattle breeds have been abandoned in favor of high-yielding black-and-white Friesian (Holstein) cows, which now account for 90% of all American dairy cattle and 85% of British.

• The cows are farmed in ever larger herds and fed an optimized diet that seldom includes fresh pasturage, so most modern milk lacks the color, flavor, and seasonal variation of preindustrial milk.

• In their roots, both milk and dairy recall the physical effort it once took to obtain milk and transform it by hand. Milk comes from an Indo-European root that meant both “milk” and “to rub off,” the connection perhaps being the stroking necessary to squeeze milk from the teat.

• In medieval times, dairy was originally dey-ery, meaning the room in which the dey, or woman servant, made milk into butter and cheese.

• Thanks to the rumen microbes, which convert the unsaturated fatty acids of grass and grain into saturated fatty acids, the milk fat of ruminant animals is the most highly saturated of our common foods. Only coconut oil beats it.

• The first fluid secreted by the mammary gland is colostrum, a creamy, yellow solution of concentrated fat, vitamins, and proteins, especially immunoglobulins and antibodies.

• According to business legend, the American Gail Borden reinvented evaporated milk around 1853 after a rough transatlantic crossing that sickened the ship’s cows. Borden added large amounts of sugar to keep his concentrated milk from spoiling.

• For sweetened condensed milk, the milk is first concentrated by evaporation, and then table sugar is added to give a total sugar concentration of about 55%.

• For sweetened condensed milk, the milk is first concentrated by evaporation, and then table sugar is added to give a total sugar concentration of about 55%. Microbes can’t grow at this osmotic pressure, so sterilization is unnecessary.

• Powdered or dry milk is the result of taking evaporation to the extreme. Milk is pasteurized at a high temperature; then about 90% of its water is removed by vacuum evaporation, and the remaining 10% in a spray drier

• Cooking Sweetened Condensed Milk Because it contains concentrated protein and sugar, sweetened condensed milk will “caramelize” (actually, undergo the Maillard browning reaction, p. 778

• Milk foams are more fragile than egg foams and whipped cream, and are generally made immediately before serving, usually as a topping for coffee drinks.

• Milk owes its foaming power to its proteins, which collect in a thin layer around the pockets of air, isolate them, and prevent the water’s strong cohesive forces from popping the bubbles. Egg foams are also stabilized by proteins (p. 101), while the foam formed by whipping cream is stabilized by fat (below, p. 31).

• Milk foams are more fragile and short-lived than egg foams because milk’s proteins are sparse — just 3% of the milk’s weight, where egg white is 10% protein

• Because the whey proteins are the critical stabilizers, milks that are fortified with added protein — usually reduced-fat and skim milks — are most easily foamed.

• For sheer inventiveness with milk itself as the primary ingredient, no country on earth can match India.

• Milk contains roughly equal weights of protein and fat, while in cream fat outweighs protein by at least 10 to 1.

• fraîche: “fresh, cool, new.” In France, crème fraîche may be either “sweet” or cultured with lactic acid bacteria; in the United States, the term always means cultured, tart, thick cream.

• Butter making is in essence a simple but laborious operation: you agitate a container of cream until the fat globules are damaged and their fat leaks out and comes together into masses large enough to gather.

• Original buttermilk, rich in free globule membrane material and with about 0.5% fat.

• In France, for example, butter from Normandy is relatively soft and favored for spreading and making sauces — Elizabeth David said, “When you get melted butter with a trout in Normandy it is difficult to believe that it is not cream” — while butter from the Charentes is firmer, and preferred for making pastries.

• Because its scant water is dispersed in tiny droplets, properly made butter resists gross contamination by microbes, and keeps well for some days at room temperature. However, its delicate flavor is easily coarsened by simple exposure to the air and to bright light, which break fat molecules into smaller fragments that smell stale and rancid.

• Ghee (from the Sanskrit for “bright”) was born of necessity. Ordinary butter spoils in only ten days in much of the country, while the clarified fat keeps six to eight months.

• The effect of salts on freezing was known in the 13th century Arab world.

• A distinct style of custard ice cream is the Italian gelato, which is typically high in butterfat as well as egg yolks, and frozen with little overrun into a very rich, dense cream.

• Generally, premium-quality ice creams are made with more cream and egg yolks than less expensive types.

• Yogurt and its relatives are native to a broad and climatically warm area of central and southwest Asia and the Middle East, an area that includes the probable home of dairying,

• Yogurt is the Turkish word for milk that has been fermented into a tart, semisolid mass; it comes from a root meaning “thick.”

• Early in the 20th century, the Russian Nobelist Ilya Metchnikov (who discovered that white blood cells fight bacterial infection) gave a scientific rationale to this belief, when he proposed that the lactic acid bacteria in fermented milks eliminate toxic microbes in our digestive system that otherwise shorten our lives.

• A distinctive subfamily among the cream cultures are the “ropy” milks of Scandinavia, so-called because they’re more than stringy: lift a spoonful of Finnish viili, Swedish långfil, or Norwegian tättemjölk, and the rest of the bowl follows it into the air.

• Cheese is one of the great achievements of humankind.

• Another remarkable fermented milk little known in the West is kefir, which is most popular in the Caucasus and may well have originated there. Unlike other fermented milks, in which the fermenting microbes are evenly dispersed, kefir is made by large, complex particles known as kefir grains, which house a dozen or more kinds of microbes, including lactobacilli, lactococci, yeasts, and vinegar bacteria.

• The earliest good evidence of cheesemaking known to date, a residue found in an Egyptian pot, dates from around 2300 BCE.

• The Ingredient Essential to Diverse Cheeses: Time

• The crowning blow to cheese diversity and quality was World War II. In continental Europe, agricultural lands became battlefields, and dairying was devastated. During the prolonged recovery, quality standards were suspended, factory production was favored for its economies of scale and ease of regulation, and consumers were grateful for any approximation of the prewar

• Surrealist poet Leon-Paul Fargue is said to have honored Camembert cheese with the title les pieds de Dieu — the feet of God.

• The standard garden variety molds come from the large and various genus Penicillium, which also gave us the antibiotic penicillin.

• Blue Molds Penicillium roqueforti, as its name suggests, is what gives sheep’s milk Roquefort cheese its veins of blue.

• Rubbery, or crumbly curd into a delicious cheese. The French term for ripening, affinage, comes from the Latin finus, meaning “end” or “ultimate point,”

• However, France and Greece lead the world in per capita cheese consumption, at better than 2 oz/60 gm per day, about double the U.S. figures, yet they’re remarkable among Western countries for their relatively low rates of heart disease, probably thanks to their high consumption of heart-protective vegetables, fruits, and wine

• Because any soft cheese contains enough moisture to permit the survival of various human pathogens, both pasteurized and unpasteurized versions are probably best avoided by people who may be especially vulnerable to infection

• The egg is one of the kitchen’s marvels, and one of nature’s. Its simple, placid shape houses an everyday miracle: the transformation of a bland bag of nutrients into a living, breathing, vigorous creature

• The Victorian Samuel Butler awarded the egg overall priority when he said that a chicken is just an egg’s way of making another egg.

• Thanks to a dominant trait unknown in any other wild or domestic chickens, the rare Chilean Araucana lays blue eggs.

• The yolk accounts for just over a third of a shelled egg’s weight, and its biological purpose is almost exclusively nutritive.

• Designed as it was to protect itself for the duration of the chick’s development, the egg is unique among our raw animal foods in its ability to remain edible for weeks, as long as it’s kept intact and cool.

• Cook all egg dishes sufficiently to kill any bacteria that might be present. This generally means holding a temperature of at least 140ºF/60ºC for 5 minutes,

• Acids and Salt Tenderize There’s no truth to the common saying that acidity and salt “toughen” egg proteins. Acids and salt do pretty much the same thing to egg proteins. They get the proteins together sooner, but they don’t let them get as close together.

• It’s easy to tell whether an intact egg is raw or already cooked. Give it a spin on its side. If it spins fast and smoothly, it’s cooked. If it seems balky and wobbly, it’s raw — the liquid insides slip and slosh and resist the movement of the solid shell.

• Custard to mean a dish prepared and served in the same container, often baked and therefore unstirred, so that it sets into a solid gel.

• Crème brûlée (“burned cream”) is also a custard topped with caramel, but here the caramel should be hard enough to shatter when rapped with a spoon.

• Rising is essential for soufflés and sponge cakes, but it is antithetical to the dense richness of cheesecake. Four basic strategies will minimize it. First, beat the ingredients slowly, gently, and only long enough to obtain an even mix. Vigorous or long beating incorporates more air bubbles that will fill with steam and expand during baking. Second, bake the cheesecake slowly in a low oven. This will allow trapped air and steam to disperse gradually and evenly. Third, don’t overbake. This will dry the filling and cause it to shrink from moisture loss. Finally, cool the cheesecake gradually in the open oven.

• Physical agitation normally breaks down and destroys structure. But beat eggs and you create structure.

• Salt increases the whipping time and decreases the foam’s stability.

• Sugar both hinders and helps foam making. Added early in the process, it delays foaming, and it reduces the foam’s ultimate volume and lightness. The delay comes from sugar’s interference with the unfolding and bonding of the proteins. And the reduction in volume and lightness is caused by the syrupy sugar-egg mixture being harder to spread into thin bubble walls. Slow foaming is a real disadvantage when the whites are whipped by hand — at standard soft-meringue levels, it doubles the work — but less so if you’re using a stand mixer. The helpful thing about sugar is that it improves the foam’s stability.

• The linguist Otto Jänicke has traced the word meringue back to an alteration of the Latin word merenda, meaning “light evening meal,” into meringa, a form that was found in the Artois and Picardie near what is now Belgium.

• Charles’s law also means that what must go up in the oven must come down at the table. A balloon expands as its temperature rises, but shrinks again if its temperature falls.

• Charles’s law is this: all else equal, the volume occupied by a given weight of gas is proportional to its temperature.

• Our primate ancestors lived almost exclusively on plant foods until 2 million years ago, when the changing African climate and diminishing vegetation led them to scavenge animal carcasses.

• Humans became active hunters around 100,000 years ago, and it’s vividly clear from cave paintings of wild cattle and horses that they saw their prey as embodiments of strength and vitality.

• Some migratory birds put on 50% of their lean weight in fat in just a few weeks, then fly 3,000 to 4,000 kilometers from the northeast United States to South America without refueling.

• Salt pork was as much a staple food as bread (hence such phrases as “scraping the bottom of the barrel” and “pork-barrel politics”).

• Today, with one-fifteenth of the world’s population, the United States eats one-third of the world’s meat. Meat consumption on this scale is possible only in wealthy societies like our own, because animal flesh remains a much less efficient source of nourishment than plant protein.

• The Saxons had their own Germanic names for the animals — ox, steer, cow, heifer, and calf; sheep, ram, wether, ewe, and lamb; swine, hog, gilt, sow, and pig — and named their flesh by attaching “meat of” to the animal name. When French became the language of the English nobility in the centuries following the Conquest, the animal names survived in the countryside, but the prepared meats were rechristened in the fashion of the court cooks: the first recipe books in English call for beef (from the French boeuf), veal (veau), mutton (mouton), and pork (porc).

• Exactly because it is a nutritious material, meat is especially vulnerable to colonization by microbes, mainly bacteria. And because animal skins and digestive tracts are rich reservoirs of bacteria, it’s inevitable that initially clean meat surfaces will be contaminated during slaughter and the removal of skin, feathers, and innards.

• The two most prominent causes of serious meat-borne illness are Salmonella and E. coli.

• Meat production is big business. In the United States just a few decades ago, it was second only to automobile manufacturing.

• Lean meat is made up of three basic materials: it’s about 75% water, 20% protein, and 3% fat. These materials are woven into three kinds of tissue. The main tissue is the mass of muscle cells, the long fibers that cause movement when they contract and relax. Surrounding the muscle fibers is the connective tissue, a kind of living glue that harnesses the fibers together and to the bones that they move. And interspersed among the fibers and connective tissue are groups of fat cells, which store fat as a source of energy for the muscle fibers.

• One, a protein called elastin for its stretchiness, is the main component of blood vessel walls and ligaments, and is especially tough; its cross-links cannot be broken by the heat of cooking.

• The major connective-tissue filament is the protein called collagen, which makes up about a third of all the protein in the animal body, and is concentrated in skin, tendons, and bones. The name comes from the Greek for “glue producing,” because when it’s heated in water, solid, tough collagen partly dissolves into sticky gelatin

• Why do chickens have both white and dark meat, and why do the two kinds of meat taste different? Why is veal pale and delicate, beef red and robust? The key is the muscle fiber. There are several different kinds of muscle fiber, each designed for a particular kind of work, and each with its own color and flavor.

• Red muscle fibers are used for prolonged efforts. They are fueled primarily by fat, whose metabolism absolutely requires oxygen, and obtain both fat (in the form of fatty acids) and oxygen from the blood. Red fibers are relatively thin, so that fatty acids and oxygen can diffuse into them from the blood more easily.

• Fat cells, on the other hand, are essentially storage tissue, and any sort of fat-soluble material can end up in them.

• In general, grass or forage feeding results in stronger-tasting meat than grain or concentrate feeding, thanks to the plants’ high content of various odorous substances, reactive polyunsaturated fatty acids, and chlorophyll, which rumen microbes convert into chemicals called terpenes, relatives of the aroma compounds in many herbs and spices

• Lambs and sheep store a number of unusual molecules, including branched-chain fatty acids that their livers produce from a compound generated by the microbes in their rumen, and thymol, the same molecule that gives thyme its aroma.

• The “piggy” flavor of pork and gamy flavor of duck are thought to come from intestinal microbes and their fat-soluble products of amino-acid metabolism,

• The deep “beefy” flavor of beef, however, is more prominent in grain-fed animals.

• And the flavor carried in fat gets stronger as animals get older, as more of the flavor compounds are put into storage. This is why lamb is generally more popular than mutton from mature sheep.

• Life intensifies flavor, and modern meat animals are living less and less.

• Cattle are our largest meat animals and take the longest to reach adulthood, about two years, so their meat is relatively dark and flavorful.

• Japan prizes its shimofuri, or highly marbled beef, of which the best known comes from the Kobe region. Steers of the native Wagyu draft breed are slaughtered at 24–30 months. High-quality heifers (and some steers) are identified and then fattened for a further year or more on grain.

• Pigs are descendents of the Eurasian wild boar, Sus scrofa.

• In China the word for “pork” is also the generic word for “meat.”

• German Kalikutische Hahn (“hen of Calicut,” an Indian port),

• The turkey was first seen by the Spanish in Mexico around 1518, and they named it with variants on the word pavo, “pea fowl.” In most other European languages its early names referred to India: French dinde, dindon (d’Inde, “of India”), German Kalikutische Hahn (“hen of Calicut,” an Indian port), Italian pollo d’India (“fowl of India”).

• November 1979, the New York Times reported that a Finnish slaughterhouse had evicted a group of young musicians from a nearby building because their practice sessions were resulting in dark-cutting meat.

• Hunt originally meant “to seize.”

• The term venison comes from the Latin verb venari, “to hunt,” but ultimately from an Indo-European root meaning “to desire, to strive for,”

• Fat Oxidation and Rancidity The most important chemical damage suffered by meats is the breakdown of their fats by both oxygen and light into small, odorous fragments that define the smell of rancidity. Rancid fat won’t necessarily make us sick, but it’s unpleasant, so its development limits how long we can age and store meat.

• Unsaturated fats are most susceptible to rancidity, which means that fish, poultry, and game birds go bad most quickly.

• Beef has the most saturated and stable of all meat fats, and keeps the longest.

• Refrigeration has two great advantages: it requires little or no preparation time, and it leaves the meat relatively unchanged from its fresh state.

• Freezing greatly extends the storage life of meat and other foods because it halts all biological processes. Life requires liquid water, and freezing immobilizes the food’s liquid water in solid crystals of ice.

• A last side effect of freezing is freezer burn, that familiar brownish-white discoloration of the meat surface that develops after some weeks or months of storage.

• How cooking forces moisture from meat. Water molecules are bound up in the protein fibrils that fill each muscle cell. As the meat is heated, the proteins coagulate, the fibrils squeeze out some of the water they had contained and shrink.

• The cook’s margin of error in cooking meat is narrower than it used to be. So it’s more useful than ever to understand how the various methods for cooking meat work, and how best to apply them to the meat of the 21st century.

• Bacteria are on the meat surfaces, not inside.

• Many traditional meat recipes were developed at a time when meats came from mature, fatty animals, and so were fairly tolerant of overcooking.

• The meats, typically poultry or pork, are immersed in a brine containing 3 to 6% salt by weight for anywhere from a few hours to two days (depending on thickness) before being cooked as usual. They come out noticeably juicier.

• Barbecuing is the low-temperature, slow heating of meat in a closed chamber by means of hot air from smoldering wood coals. It’s an outdoor cousin to the slow oven roast, and produces smoky, fall-apart tender meat.

• The term barbecue comes via the Spanish barbacoa from the West Indies, and a Taino word that meant a framework of green sticks suspended on corner posts, on which meat, fish, and other foods were laid and cooked in the open over fire and coals.

• Fats and oils are a useful cooking medium because they can be heated to temperatures well above the boiling point of water, and can therefore dry, crisp, and brown the food surface.

• In fact, moisture loss is proportional to meat temperature, so the high heat of searing actually dries out the meat surface more than moderate heat does.

• Meats cooked in liquid should be allowed to cool in that liquid, and are best served at temperatures well below the cooking temperature, around 120ºF/50ºC.

• Hot water is such an effective heat transmitter that it cooks flat tender cuts of meat very quickly.

• Poach is a medieval word from the French for the “pouch” of gently cooked egg white that forms around the yolk.

• Braise and stew are both 18th-century borrowings from the French, the first coming from a word for “coal,” and referring to the practice of putting coals under and atop the cooking pot, the second from étuve, meaning stove or heated room and so a hot enclosure.

• A moist, tender braise or stew results from the cook’s cumulative attention to several details of procedure. The most important rule: never let the meat interior get anywhere near the boil.

• Keep the meat as intact as possible to minimize cut surfaces through which fluids can escape. If the meat must be cut, cut it into relatively large pieces, at least an inch/2.5 cm on a side. Brown the meat very quickly in a hot pan so that the inside of the meat warms only slightly. This kills microbes on the meat surfaces, and creates flavor. Start the pot with meat and cooking liquid in a cold oven, the pot lid ajar to allow some evaporation, and set the thermostat to 200ºF/93ºC, so that it heats the stew to around 120ºF/50ºC slowly, over two hours. Raise the oven temperature to 250ºF/120ºC so that the stew slowly warms from 120ºF to 180ºF/80ºC. After an hour, check the meat every half hour, and stop the cooking when it is easily penetrated by the tines of a fork. Let the meat cool in the stew, where it will reabsorb some liquid. The liquid will probably need to be reduced by boiling to improve flavor and consistency. Remove the meat first.

• There’s some evidence that microwaves are unusually effective at dissolving collagen into gelatin.

• Large oven roasts should be allowed to rest on the countertop for at least a half hour before carving, not only to allow the “afterheat” to finish cooking the center (p. 153), but also to allow the meat to cool down, ideally to 120ºF/50ºC or so. (This may take well over an hour; some chefs allow for a rest period equal to the roasting time.

• Whenever possible, meat is carved across the grain of the muscle fibers to reduce the impression of fibrousness in the mouth and make the meat easier to chew. Carving knives should be kept sharp. Sawing away with a dull blade compresses the tissue and squeezes its delicious liquid away. Finally, remember that the saturated fats of beef, lamb, and pork are solid at room temperature, which means that they rapidly congeal on the plate.

• The word meat is used most commonly to mean the limb-moving skeletal muscles of animals

• Foie gras is the “fat liver” of force-fed geese and ducks. It has been made and appreciated since Roman times and probably long before; the force-feeding of geese is clearly represented in Egyptian art from 2500

• It’s a kind of living pâté, ingeniously prepared in the growing bird before it’s slaughtered. Constant overnourishment causes the normally small, lean, red organ to grow to 10 times its normal size and reach a fat content of 50 to 65%. The fat is dispersed in insensibly fine droplets within the liver cells, and creates an incomparably integrated, delicate blend of smoothness, richness, and savoriness.

• The word sausage comes from the Latin for “salt,” and names a mixture of chopped meat and salt stuffed into an edible tube.

• Salt plays two important roles in the sausage: it controls the growth of microbes, and it dissolves one of the fiber filament proteins (myosin) out of the muscle fibers and onto the meat surfaces, where it acts as a glue to bind the pieces together.

• The preservation of meat from biological spoilage has been a major challenge throughout human history. The earliest methods, which go back at least 4,000 years, were physical and chemical treatments that make meat inhospitable to microbes.

• Nowadays, meat is dried by briefly salting it to inhibit surface microbes and then heating it in low-temperature convection ovens to remove at least two-thirds of its weight and 75% of its moisture (more than 10% moisture may allow Penicillium and Aspergillus molds to grow).

• Because its flavor has been concentrated and its texture is interesting, dried meat remains popular. Modern examples include American jerky, Latin American carne seca, Norwegian fenalår and southern African biltong, whose textures can range from chewy to brittle.

• These days the word confit is used loosely to describe just about anything cooked slowly and gently to a rich, succulent consistency:

• It comes via the French verb confire, from the Latin conficere, meaning “to do, to produce, to make, to prepare.”

• Around 1800, a French brewer and confectioner named Nicolas Appert discovered that if he sealed food in a glass container and then heated the container in boiling water, the food would keep indefinitely without spoiling.

• Canned meat a century old has been eaten without harm, if also without much pleasure.

• By 40,000 years ago the hunters of prehistoric Europe were carving salmon images and making the first hooks to catch river fish; and not long afterward, they ventured onto the ocean in boats.

• Today in the United States, all of the rainbow trout and nearly all of the catfish sold are farmed on land in various kinds of ponds and tanks. Norway pioneered the ocean farming of Atlantic salmon in large offshore pens in the 1960s; and today more than a third of the salmon eaten in the world is farmed in Europe and North and South America.

• About a third of the world warm-water shrimp harvest is cultured, mainly in Asia. In all, about 70 species are now farmed worldwide.

• Omega-3 fatty acids are essential to the development and function of the brain and the retina, and it appears that an abundance in our diet helps ensure the health of the central nervous system in infancy and throughout life.

• Fish owe their small, light bones, delicate connective tissue, and large, pale muscle masses to the fact that water is much denser than air. Fish can attain a neutral buoyancy — can be almost weightless — simply by storing some lighter-than-water oils or gas in their bodies.

• The paleness of fish flesh results from water’s buoyancy and its resistance to movement

• But water’s resistance to movement increases exponentially with the fish’s speed. This means that fish must develop very high power very quickly when accelerating. And so they devote most of their muscle mass to an emergency powerpack of fast-twitch white cells that are used only for occasional bursts of rapid movement.

• The cold aquatic environment is also responsible for the notorious tendency of fish and shellfish to spoil faster than other meats. The cold has two different effects. First, it requires fish to rely on the highly unsaturated fatty acids that remain fluid at low temperatures: and these molecules are highly susceptible to being broken by oxygen into stale-smelling, cardboardy fragments. More importantly, cold water requires fish to have enzymes that work well in the cold, and the bacteria that live in and on the fish also thrive at low temperatures.

• The enzymes and bacteria typical of our warm-blooded meat animals normally work at 100ºF/40ºC, and are slowed to a crawl in a refrigerator at 40ºF/5ºC. But the same refrigerator feels perfectly balmy to deep-water fish enzymes and spoilage bacteria.

• There are exceptions, but most fish can be thought of as sheets of muscle tissue anchored with connective tissue and the backbone to a propulsive tail. The animals push water behind them, developing thrust by undulations of the whole body and flexing of the tail.

• Because the motion for steady swimming comes mostly from the back end of the fish, the tail region contains more connective tissue than the head end, and seems more succulent.

• Few of us get the chance to enjoy the experience, but very fresh fish smell surprisingly like crushed plant leaves!

• The strong smell that we readily identify as “fishy” is largely due to the saltwater-balancing compound TMAO

• Freshwater fish generally don’t accumulate TMAO, and crustaceans accumulate relatively little, so they don’t get as fishy as ocean fish.

• TMA on the surface can be rinsed off with tap water. And acidic ingredients — lemon juice, vinegar, tomatoes — help in two ways. They encourage the stale fragments to react with water and become less volatile; and they contribute a hydrogen ion to TMA and DMA, which thereby take on a positive electrical charge, bond with water and other nearby molecules, and never escape the fish surface to enter our nose.

• Salmon quality is thus at its peak as the fish approach the mouth of their home river, which is where commercial fishermen take them.

• Opinions vary on the relative qualities of wild and farmed salmon. Some professional cooks prefer the fattiness and more consistent quality of farm fish, while others prefer the stronger flavor and firmer texture of wild fish at their best.

• The “cod icefish” family is a group of large, sedentary plankton-eaters that live in the cold deep waters off Antarctica. The best known of them is the fatty “Chilean sea bass,” an inaccurate but more palatable commercial name for the Patagonian toothfish

• Norwegians prize cod held in tanks at the market and killed to order just before cooking (blodfersk, or “blood-fresh”);

• For most of the foods that we want to store fresh for a few days, the ordinary refrigerator is quite adequate. The exception to the rule is fresh fish, whose enzymes and microbes are accustomed to cold waters (p.

• The familiar bite-sized morsels of raw fish and lightly salted and acidified rice are nigiri sushi, meaning “grasped” or “squeezed,” since the rice portion is usually molded by hand.

• Sushi chefs take great care to avoid contamination of the fish. They use a solution of cold water and chlorine bleach to clean surfaces between preparations, and they change cleaning solutions and cloths frequently during service.

• Ceviche is an ancient dish from the northern coast of South America, in which small cubes or thin slices of raw fish are “cooked” by immersing them in citrus juice or another acidic liquid, usually with onion, chilli peppers, and other seasonings.

• Kinilaw is the indigenous Philippine version of acid marination. Morsels of fish or shellfish are dipped for only a few seconds into an acidic liquid, often vinegar made from the coconut, nipa palm, or sugarcane, to which condiments have been added.

• In the case of “jumping salad,” tiny shrimp or crabs are sprinkled with salt, doused with lime juice, and eaten alive and moving.

• The Hawaiian islands have contributed poke (“slice,” “cut”) and lomi (“rub,” “press,” “squeeze”).

• Cooked fish fall into four broad flavor families. Saltwater white fish are the mildest. Freshwater white fish have a stronger aroma thanks to their larger repertoire of fatty-acid fragments and traces of earthiness from ponds and tanks. Freshwater trout have characteristic sweet and mushroomy aromas. Salmon and sea-run trout, thanks to the carotenoid pigments that they accumulate from ocean crustaceans, develop fruity, flowery aromas and a distinctive family note (from an oxygen-containing carbon ring). Tuna, mackerel, and their relatives have a meaty, beefy aroma.

• Japanese scientists have found that certain ingredients help reduce the odor, apparently by limiting fatty-acid oxidation or preemptively reacting with TMAO: these include green tea and such aromatics as onion, bay, sage, clove, ginger, and cinnamon, which may also mask the fishy smell with their own.

• The classic Japanese version of fried fish is fish tempura, a preparation and term that were borrowed in the late 16th century from Portuguese and Spanish missionaries who cooked fish during fasting seasons (tempora means “period of time”).

• All crustaceans share the same basic body plan, which can be divided roughly into two parts. The forward portion, or cephalothorax, often called the “head” in shrimp, is the equivalent of our head and trunk put together. It includes the mouth, sensing antennae and eyes, five pairs of manipulating and crawling appendages, and the main organs of the digestive, circulatory, respiratory, and reproductive systems. The rear portion, or abdomen, usually called the “tail,” is mostly a large, meaty block of swimming muscle that moves the fin-like plates at the back end. The major exception to this body plan is the crab, which seldom swims; its abdomen is a thin plate folded up underneath a greatly enlarged cephalothorax.

• Most of the shellfish we eat are creatures from one of two groups, the crustaceans and the molluscs.

• Crustaceans are the shellfish that have legs and sometimes claws: shrimps and prawns, lobsters and crayfish, and crabs.

• There were primitive shrimps 200 million years ago; today there are some 38,000 crustacean species, the largest with a claw span of 12 feet/4 meters!

• The forward part of the crustacean body, the cephalothorax or “head,” contains the digestive and reproductive organs. The rear part, the abdomen or “tail,” is mainly fast muscle tissue that moves the rear fins and propels shrimp

• As a crustacean grows, it must periodically cast off the old cuticle and create a larger new one. This process is called molting.

• Molting means that the quality of crustacean flesh is highly variable, and this is why wild harvests are seasonal, with the seasons depending on the particular animal and location

• Shrimp comes from the Indo-European root skerbh, meaning to turn, bend, or shrink, perhaps reflecting the curled shape of these creatures.

• The near-synonym prawn first appears in medieval times, and its origins are unknown.

• Crab and crayfish both derive from the Indo-European gerbh, meaning to scratch or carve, something that crustacean claws readily do to human skin.

• Lobster shares with locust the Indo-European root lek, meaning to leap or fly: a remarkably early recognition of the family resemblance of crustaceans and insects.

• Crustacean itself comes from an Indo-European root meaning to freeze, to form a crust, and describes the hard outer skeleton of these creatures. It shares this root with crystal.

• This highly successful and diverse branch of the animal kingdom got its start half a billion years ago and currently includes 100,000 species, double the number of fish and animal species with backbones, from snails just a millimeter across to giant clams and squids.

• The secret to the molluscs’ success — and their strangeness — is their adaptable body plan. It includes three major parts: a muscular “foot” for moving; an intricate assembly that includes the circulatory, digestive, and sexual organs; and enveloping this assembly, a versatile sheet-like “mantle” that takes on such jobs as secreting materials for a shell, supporting eyes and small tentacles that detect food or danger, and contracting and relaxing to control water flow into the interior.

• Abalones, the most primitive, have one cup-like shell for protection, and a massive, tough muscular foot for moving along and clinging to the seaweed on which their rasping mouths feed.

• All the bivalves — clams, mussels, oysters — have comb-like gills for filtering food particles from the water that the mantle draws in and expels. Mussels are also two-shelled filter feeders, but they attach their foot permanently to intertidal and subtidal rocks. They have no need for a siphon, and one of their tough shell-closing muscles is much reduced. Oysters cement themselves to inter- and sub-tidal rocks. Their two heavy shells are closed by a single large muscle at their center, around which the mantle and other organs are organized. The bulk of their body is the tender mantle and food-trapping gills. Scallops neither attach nor bury themselves. They lie free on the ocean floor, and escape predators by swimming. Their massive central muscle claps their shells

• The immobile molluscs do very well in aquaculture. They can be raised in large numbers in the water’s three dimensions, suspended in nets or on ropes, and grow rapidly thanks to the good circulation of oxygen and nutrients.

• Because shellfish use amino acids to counteract salt concentration, the saltier the water, the more savory the shellfish.

• Clams and relatives often benefit from several hours’ immersion in a bucket of cold salt water (1/3 cup salt per gallon, or 20 gm/l) to clean themselves of residual sand and grit.

• When the cook wants to “shuck” an oyster or clam, or open the shell and remove the raw meat, it’s the hinge ligament and adductor muscles that must be dealt with.

• The U.S. term “hard shell” is applied to sturdy clams that close completely (little-neck, quahog), while “soft shell” clams have siphons much longer than the shell, which is thin and always gapes (steamer, longneck).

• Abalone entered English via Spanish from the Monterey Indian word for this streamlined snail, aulun.

• Clam began in the Indo-European gel, a compact mass: cloud, cling, and clamp are its linguistic relatives. Mussel derives from the Indo-European mus, meaning both “mouse” and “muscle,” which moves quickly like a mouse under the skin.

• Oyster, from the Indo-European ost, “bone,” names the mollusc with the heavy and bone-colored shell. Scallop, with its unusually symmetrical and patterned valves, comes via the Middle French escalope, from a Germanic word for “shell.”

• And squid? To date, the linguists are stumped. It appeared out of nowhere in the 17th century.

• Mussels are the easiest molluscs to prepare; they tolerate some overcooking and readily come off the shell.

• Oysters became scarce as early as the 17th century, and are now largely farmed.

• The greater the salinity of the water, the more taste-active amino acids the oyster’s cells must contain to balance the dissolved salt outside, and so the more savory its flavor.

• Gravlax originated in medieval Scandinavia as a lightly salted, pressed form of salmon that was preserved by fermentation (p. 235) and had a strong smell.

• Fish pastes and sauces are two phases of the same simple preparation. A mass of fish or shellfish is mixed with salt to give an overall salt concentration between 10% and 30%, and sealed in a closed container for from one month (for pastes) to 24 months (for sauces). Fish pastes tend to have relatively strong fish and cheese notes, while the more thoroughly transformed fish sauces are more meaty and savory.

• One notorious example is Swedish Surstrømming. Herring are fermented in barrels for one to two months, then sealed in cans and allowed to continue for as much as another year. The cans swell, which is normally a warning sign for the growth of botulism bacteria, but for surstrømming a sign of promising flavor development. The unusual bacteria responsible for ripening in the can are species of Haloanaerobium, which produce hydrogen and carbon dioxide gases, hydrogen sulfide, and butyric, propionic, and acetic acids: in effect a combination of rotten eggs, rancid Swiss cheese, and vinegar, overlaid onto the basic fish flavor!

• Katsuobushi is to the Japanese tradition what a concentrated veal stock is to the French: a convenient flavor base for many soups and sauces.

• For the basic broth called dashi, cold water is brought just to the boil with a piece of kombu seaweed, which is then removed. The katsuobushi shavings are added, the liquid brought again to the boil, and poured off the shavings the moment they absorb enough water to fall to the bottom.

• Of all foods from the waters, the most expensive and luxurious are fish eggs. Caviar, the salted roe of the sturgeon, is the animal kingdom’s truffle:

• Though the term caviar is now widely used to describe any sort of lightly salted loose fish eggs, for many centuries it referred only to loose sturgeon eggs.

• Plants are independent autotrophs, while animals are parasitic heterotrophs. (Parasitism may not sound especially admirable, but without it there would be no need to eat and so none of the pleasures of eating and cooking!

• Plants are essentially stationary chemical factories, made up of chambers for carbohydrate synthesis and carbohydrate storage, and tubes to transfer chemicals from one part of the factory to another, with structural reinforcement — also mainly carbohydrates — to provide mechanical rigidity and strength.

• A partial list of their chemical warfare agents would include irritating compounds like mustard oil, hot-chilli capsaicin, and the tear-inducing factor in onions; bitter and toxic alkaloids like caffeine in coffee and solanine in potatoes; the cyanide compounds found in lima beans and many fruit seeds; and substances that interfere with the digestive process, including astringent tannins and inhibitors of digestive enzymes.

• We’ve managed to learn which irritating warning signals are relatively harmless, and have come to enjoy sensations whose actual purpose is to repel us. Hence our seemingly perverse love of mustard and pepper and onions. This is the essential appeal of herbs and spices,

• Life arose about 4 billion years ago, but flowering plants have been around for only about 200 million years, and dominant for the last 50 million.

• Vegetable comes from the Latin verb vegere, meaning to invigorate or enliven. Fruit, on the other hand, comes from Latin fructus, whose cluster of related meanings includes gratification, pleasure, satisfaction, enjoyment.

• Herbs come from green parts of plants, usually leaves — parsley, thyme, basil — while spices are generally seeds, bark, underground stems — black pepper, cinnamon, ginger

• The word spice came from the medieval Latin species, which meant “kind of merchandise.”

• Despite the fact that we consider them vegetables, capsicum “peppers,” pea pods, cucumbers, and even corn kernels are actually fruits: plant parts that originate in the flower’s ovary and surround one or more seeds.

• There are 300,000 edible plant species on earth, and perhaps 2,000 that are cultivated to some extent.

• Fiber is defined as the material in our plant foods that our digestive enzymes can’t break down into absorbable nutrients.

• Organs There are six major plant organs: the root, the stem, the leaf, the flower, the fruit, and the seed.

• Some leaves are as much as 70% air by volume. This structure helps explain why leafy vegetables shrink so much when cooked: heat collapses the spongy interior.

• The earth is painted green with chlorophylls, the molecules that harvest solar energy and funnel it into the photosynthetic system that converts it into sugar molecules.

• Carotenoids are so named because the first member of this large family to be chemically isolated came from carrots. These pigments absorb blue and green wavelengths and are responsible for most of the yellow and orange colors in fruits and vegetables

• Anthocyanins (from the Greek for “blue flower”) are responsible for most of the red, purple, and blue colors in plants, including many berries, apples, cabbage, radishes, and potatoes.

• Sugar is the main product of photosynthesis, and its sweetness is the main attraction provided by fruits for their animal seed dispersers.

• The average sugar content of ripe fruit is 10 to 15% by weight.

• These phenolics are called tannins because they have been used since prehistory to tan animal hides into tough leather by bonding with the skin proteins.

• Fruits are more acidic than vegetables, so they’re resistant to many bacteria but more readily attacked by yeasts and molds

• “One rotten apple spoils the barrel”: moldy fruit or vegetables should be discarded and refrigerator drawers and fruit bowls should be cleaned regularly to reduce the microbial population.

• Practically, this means it’s best to keep plant foods in restricted spaces — plastic bags, or drawers within a refrigerator — to slow down moisture loss to the compartment as a whole and to the outside. At the same time, living produce exhales carbon dioxide and water, so moisture can accumulate and condense on the food surfaces, which encourages microbial attack. Lining the container with an absorbent material — a paper towel or bag — will delay condensation.

• Technique sometimes called “sweating” (Italian soffrito or Catalan soffregit, both meaning “underfrying”): the very slow cooking over low heat of finely chopped vegetables coated with oil, to develop a flavor base for a dish featuring other ingredients.

• Italy, which gave us the term sorbet (via sorbetto from the Arabic sharab, or “syrup”).

• The Greek term for quinces packed in honey, melimelon, gave us the word marmalade

• Our word root comes from an Indo-European word that meant both “root” and “branch.”

• Patata, a version of the word used by the Taino peoples of the Caribbean for the sweet potato, batata.

• Potato came into English via the Spanish patata, a version of the word used by the Taino peoples of the Caribbean for the sweet potato, batata.

• When onions and their relatives are heated, the various sulfur compounds react with each other and with other substances to produce a range of characteristic flavor molecules. The cooking method, temperature, and medium strongly affect the flavor balance.

• Onion itself comes from the Latin for “one,” “oneness,” “unity,” and was the name given by Roman farmers to a variety of onion (cepa

• Garlic is an Anglo-Saxon word that meant “spear-leek”: a leek with a slim, pointed leaf blade rather than a broad, open one.

• And both shallot and scallion come via Latin from Ashqelon, the Hebrew name for a city in what in classical times was southwest Palestine.

• Celery is often combined with carrots and onions in gently fried aromatic base preparations for other dishes (French mirepoix, Italian soffrito, Spanish sofregit; in the Louisiana Cajun “trinity” of aromatics the carrots are replaced by green capsicums

• Today’s mild, widely popular lettuces, varieties of the species Lactuca sativa, derive from an inedibly bitter weedy ancestor, L. serriola, that grew in Asia and the Mediterranean and has been under cultivation and improvement for 5,000 years.

• Kale, collards, and cauliflower, have names that derive from the Latin word caulis, meaning “stem” or “stalk,”

• Cabbage itself comes from the Latin caput, meaning “head”:

• The name is a corruption, via Italian, of the Arabic al’ qarshuf, meaning “little cardoon”;

• Today, after their domestication in Mexico (their name comes from the Aztec term for “plump fruit,” tomatl),

• Olives are the small fruits of Olea europaea, a remarkably hardy, drought-tolerant tree that’s native to the eastern Mediterranean region, and that can live and bear for a thousand years.

• Ancient Greek name elaia is the source of the English oil (and Italian olio, French huile).

• More oil, but of lesser quality, is extracted by pressing repeatedly and by heating the paste; oil extracted in the “first cold pressing” is the most delicate and stable, and most likely to yield “extra virgin” oil

• In 1908 a Japanese chemist, Kikunae Ikeda, found that kombu is an especially rich source of monosodium glutamate — in fact it forms crystals on the surface of dried kombu. He also found that MSG provides a unique, savory taste sensation, different from the standard sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. He named this sensation umami (a rough translation is “delicious”), and pointed out that other foods, including meats and cheese, also provide it.

• Inflated by water as they are, mushrooms are 80–90% water, with a thin outer cuticle that allows rapid moisture loss and gain.

• Mushrooms can be cooked in many different ways. Their flavor is generally most developed and intense when they are cooked slowly with dry heat to allow enzymes some time to work before being inactivated, and to cook out some of their abundant water and concentrate the amino acids, sugars, and aromas.

• Our word ripe began as an Old English word meaning “ready for reaping,” and like reap comes ultimately from an Indo-European root meaning “to cut.” River, rope, row, and rigatoni are all relatives.

• Climacteric can be traced back to a root meaning “to lean,” which led to the Greek climax, “ladder,”

• Pears are sensitive to carbon dioxide, so they shouldn’t be enclosed in plastic bags at any stage.

• Europe had its own native strawberry (F. vesca and F. moschata), which is now called the “wild” strawberry or fraise de bois(“woodland strawberry”), even though it’s cultivated.

• Berry comes from an Indo-European root meaning “to shine,” perhaps for the bright colors of many small fruits.

• The straw in strawberry comes from a root for “to spread, to strew.”

• Date comes from the Greek word for “finger,” daktulos,

• Pomegranate comes from medieval French, and is a combination of Latin roots meaning “apple” and “grainy” or “seedy.”

• Orange comes ultimately from the Sanskrit word for the fruit

• Blood oranges owe the deep maroon color of their juice to anthocyanin pigments, which develop only when night temperatures are low, in the Mediterranean autumn and winter.

• Durian Durian is the large, thorn-covered fruit of a tree, Durio zibethinus, that’s a native of Southeast Asia and cultivated mainly in Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia.

• Banana comes from several West African languages, mango from south Indian Tamil, papaya from Carib, durian from Malay (a word meaning “thorn”).

• Ananas comes from a Guarani Indian word for the fruit; pineapple from the Spanish piña due to its resemblance to the similarly composite pinecone.

• What makes herbs and spices not only nontoxic and edible but delicious is a simple principle of cooking: dilution.

• The flavorful material in an herb or spice is traditionally called its essential oil. The term reflects an important practical fact: aroma chemicals are more similar to oils and fats than they are to water, and are therefore more soluble in oil than they are in water

• Because they come from warm climates, basil and perilla suffer chilling injury in the refrigerator and so are best kept at room temperature, with freshly cut stems immersed in water.

• Careful chopping with a sharp knife leaves much of the herb structure intact to provide fresh flavor while minimizing cell damage to the cut edges; by contrast, a dull knife crushes rather than cuts, bruises a wide swath of cells, and can result in rapid brown-black discoloration.

• Oils and fats dissolve more aroma molecules than water during cooking, but also hang on to them during eating, so that their flavor appears more gradually and persists longer.

• Indian cooks also aromatize some dishes with a remarkable combination of smoking and spicing called dhungar. They put the dish into a pot along with a hollowed onion or small bowl that contains a live coal, sprinkle the coal with ghee and sometimes spices, and cover the pot tightly to infuse the dish with the fumes.

• Thyme Thyme got its name from the Greeks, who used it as an aromatic in their burnt sacrifices; it shares its root with the words for “spirit” and “smoke.”

• Coriander Coriander or cilantro is said to be the most world’s most widely consumed fresh herb.

• Parsley Parsley is a native of southeast Europe and west Asia; its name comes from the Greek and means “rock celery.”

• Capers Capers are the unopened flower buds of a Mediterranean bush, Capparis spinosa, which have been gathered from the wild and pickled for thousands of years, though cultivated only for a couple of centuries.

• Kaffir” is Arabic for “unbeliever” and has derogatory connotations).

• Mustard seed has been found in prehistoric sites from Europe to China, and was the first and only native pungent spice available to early Europe.

• Saffron is the world’s most expensive spice: a testament not only to the labor required to produce it, but to its unique ability to impart both an unusual flavor and an intense yellow color to foods. The name comes from the Arabic for “thread.”

• Today Iran and Spain are the major producers and exporters. They use saffron in their respective rice dishes, pilaf and paella; the French in their fish stew, bouillabaisse; the Italians in risotto milanese; the Indians in biryanis and milk sweets.

• It takes about 70,000 crocus flowers to produce 5 lb/2.25 kg of stigmas, the three dark red ends of the tube (“style”) that carries pollen down to the plant’s ovary. These 5 pounds in turn dry down to about 1 lb/450 gm of saffron.

• And because they’re so delicate, the stigmas are still harvested and separated from the other flower parts by hand, with nearly 200 hours of labor required for that same 1 pound of dried

• And because they’re so delicate, the stigmas are still harvested and separated from the other flower parts by hand, with nearly 200 hours of labor required for that same 1 pound of dried saffron.

• Cardamom Cardamom is the world’s third most expensive spice after saffron and vanilla.

• The word comes from an Arabic root meaning “to warm”; and cardamom has a delicate, warming quality due to two different sets of aromatics, both stored in a layer just below the seed surface:

• Today the Nordic countries consume 10% of world trade, mainly in baked goods, while Arab countries take 80% for their cardamom coffee.

• Gahwa is made by boiling together freshly roasted and ground coffee with freshly broken green cardamom pods.

• A surprisingly large fraction of the ginger trade goes to Yemen, where it is added to coffee (as much as 15% of the coffee’s weight).

• In the United States, the main use of turmeric is to provide color and nonpungent filler in prepared mustards.

• Vanilla Vanilla is one of the most popular flavorings in the world. Among the spices it’s unique for the richness, depth, and persistence of its flavor.

• The first Europeans to taste vanilla were the Spanish, who gave it its name; vainilla is the Spanish diminutive for “sheath” or “husk” (from the Latin vagina).

• Tea leaves and coffee beans have one defense in common, and that’s caffeine, a bitter alkaloid that has significant effects on our bodies.

• Caffeine is the most widely consumed behavior-modifying chemical in the world.

• And very pure distilled water gives a brew best described as flat, with a missing dimension of flavor.

• Though it has lent its name to many other infusions, tea — from the Chinese word cha — is a drink prepared from the green leaves of a kind of camellia.

• Buddhist monks who valued tea as an aid to long hours of study found that tea itself was worthy of their contemplation. They developed the formal tea ceremony, which remains remarkable for the attention it pays to the simplest of preparations, an infusion of leaves in water.

• Today about three-quarters of the tea produced in the world is black tea. China and Japan still produce and drink more green tea than black.

• Oolong Tea Oolong tea is made by allowing some modest enzyme transformation of leaf juices.

• Our word coffee comes from the Arabic qahwah, whose own origin is unclear.

• Today Brazil, Vietnam, and Colombia are the largest exporters of coffee; African countries contribute about a fifth of world production.

• Around 1750, the French came up with the most important advance before espresso: the drip pot, in which hot water was poured onto a bed of grounds and allowed to pass through into a separate chamber. This invention did three things: it kept the temperature of the extracting water below the boil, it limited the contact time between water and ground coffee to a matter of a few minutes, and it produced a sedimentless brew that would keep for a while without getting stronger.

• That was Italian espresso, a word which means something made at the moment it’s ordered, rapidly, and for one customer.

• Coffea arabica, a 15 ft/5 m tree that is native to the cool highlands of Ethiopia and the Sudan, produces what are known as “arabica” beans; and Coffea canephora, a larger tree native to hotter, more humid West Africa, produces “robusta” beans.

• About two-thirds of the beans in international trade are arabicas, which develop a more complex and balanced flavor than the robustas.

• The Development of Coffee Flavor The hotter the bean is roasted, the darker it gets, and its color is a good indicator of flavor balance.

• Serving and Holding Coffee Freshly brewed coffee is best enjoyed immediately — its flavor is evanescent. The ideal drinking temperature is around 140ºF/ 60ºC, where a sip won’t scald the mouth, and the coffee’s full aroma comes out.

• The cereals (from Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture) are plants in the grass family, the Gramineae, whose members produce edible and nutritious seeds, the grains.

• Legumes The legumes (from the Latin legere, “to gather”) are plants in the bean family, the Leguminosae, whose members bear pods that contain several seeds.

• Nuts The nuts (from an Indo-European root meaning “compressed”

• Seeds are generally dry, with only about 10% of their weight coming from water.

• Because most of the seeds we eat are designed to survive a dormant, dry period, they are the easiest food ingredients to store.

• Major Eurasian cereals — wheat, barley, rye, and oats — originally grew wild in extensive stands on the temperate high plains of the Near East.

• The endosperm (from the Greek: “within the seed”) is often the only part of the grain consumed.

• Muesli is a simple mixture of thinly rolled grains, sugar, dried fruits, and nuts.

• Our word “cereal” comes from the Roman goddess of the fields, Ceres, whose name came in turn from an Indo-European root, ker, that meant “to grow”; the same root also led to “create,” “increase,” and “crescent.”

• Bhares was the word for “barley” and also gave us “barn”; wrughyo meant “rye.” “Wheat” came from the same root that gives us “white” (kweit), apparently because its flour was light in color; and “oat” came from oid, “to swell.”

• Einkorn wheat, T. monococcum, was rediscovered in the early 1970s in the Vaucluse region of France and the southern Alps, where it was being grown to make a local porridge. It was probably the first wheat to be cultivated, around 10,000 years ago.

• Italian risotto rices and Spanish paella rices are medium-grain japonicas.

• Most Chinese and Indian rices are long-grain indicas, as is most of the rice sold in the United States.

• Sticky rice, also called waxy, glutinous, or sweet rice, is a short-grain type whose starch is practically all amylopectin

• Rice flour is notable for being around 90% starch, and for having the smallest starch granules of the major cereals, a half to a quarter the size of wheat starch granules.

• Beans and peas belong to the third largest family among the flowering plants (after the orchid and daisy families), and the second most important family in the human diet, after the grasses.

• Everyone produces a mixture of gases from their intestine, about a quart a day, thanks to the growth and metabolism of our resident bacteria. Many legumes, especially soy, navy, and lima beans, cause a sudden increase in bacterial activity and gas production a few hours after they’re consumed.

• Everyone produces a mixture of gases from their intestine, about a quart a day, thanks to the growth and metabolism of our resident bacteria. Many legumes, especially soy, navy, and lima beans, cause a sudden increase in bacterial activity and gas production a few hours after they’re consumed. This is because they contain large amounts of carbohydrates that human digestive enzymes can’t convert into absorbable sugars. These carbohydrates therefore leave the upper intestine unchanged and enter the lower reaches, where our resident bacterial population does the job we are unable to do.

• In Egypt, the popular dish called ful medames is made by boiling the mature beans until soft, then flavoring with salt, lemon juice, oil, and garlic.

• The use of the common bean in Peru was predated by the larger lima bean — the name derives from Peru’s capital —

• Hoisin sauce, ha-hsien chiang, made from the residue of soy-sauce making, mixed with wheat flour, sugar, vinegar, chilli pepper; served with Peking duck and mu shu pork

• New Japanese name, miso — mi meaning flavor — was given to distinctive Japanese versions of the paste.

• Oils are extracted from nuts by two different means. “Cold-pressed” or “expeller-pressed” nut oils are made by crushing the nut cells and forcing the oil out with mechanical pressure. The nuts get hot from the pressure and friction, but generally don’t exceed the boiling point. Solvent-extracted oils are made by dissolving the oil out of the crushed nuts with a solvent at temperatures around 300ºF/150ºC, then separating the oil from the solvent. They are more refined than pressed oils, having fewer of the trace compounds that make oils both flavorful and potentially allergenic (p. 455). Cold-pressed oils are generally used as a flavoring, refined oils as cooking oils.

• “companion” and “company” from the late Latin companio, or “one who shares bread.”

• Dough comes from an Indo-European root that meant “to form, to build,”

• The word bread comes from a Germanic root, and originally meant a piece or bit of a loaf, with loaf meaning the leavened, baked substance itself.

• While the words for ground grain in French, Italian, and Spanish, farine and farina, come from the Latin for a kind of grain (far), the English word “flour” arose in medieval times from “flower,” meaning the best part of the ground grain:

• He named this substance gluten, using the Latin word for “glue.” Gluten in turn came from an Indo-European root gel-¸ which gave rise to a number of words meaning to form into a ball, to make a coagulated lump, to be thick or sticky: these include cloud, globe, gluteus, clam, cling, and clay.

• Most flours are refined: that is, they have been sieved to remove the germ and bran layers from the particles of protein-and starch-rich endosperm.

• The word “yeast,” however, is as old as the language, and first meant the froth or sediment of a fermenting liquid that could be used to leaven bread.

• Leavening comes from an Indo-European root meaning “light, having little weight.” Related words from the same root include levity, lever, relieve, and lung.

• Yeast comes from a root word that meant “to seethe, boil, bubble over.”

• The word knead comes from an Indo-European root meaning “to compress into a ball”; related words are gnocchi, quenelle, knoll, and knuckle.

• Cool temperatures slow the activity of microbes substantially; yeasts take 10 times longer to raise bread in the refrigerator than at warm room temperature. Refrigeration of dough is therefore called retarding, and the cold chamber a retarder. Retarding is now a common practice.

• Though stale now suggests a food that is past its prime, old and dried out, it hasn’t always had these negative connotations. It is a medieval Teutonic word, and originally meant “to stand” or “to age.”

• Storing Bread: Avoid the Refrigerator Staling proceeds most rapidly at temperatures just above freezing, and very slowly below freezing. In one experiment, bread stored in the refrigerator at 46ºF/7ºC staled as much in one day as bread held at 86ºF/30ºC did in six days.

• Sourdough Breads Sourdough breads get their name from the fact that both the dough and bread are acid.

• Pumpernickel comes from Westphalian dialect words for the devil (St. Nick) and for “fart”: this is a high-fiber bread.

• Bagel comes via Yiddish from a German root meaning “ring,” and pretzel directly from a German word of Latin origin meaning “little bracelet,” so both are named for their shape.

• Brioche is French, its root apparently broyer, meaning to grind or knead.

• The term biscuit is an ambiguous one. It comes from the French for “twice-cooked,”

• The word doughnut was coined in the United States in the 19th century to name what the Dutch called olykoeks, portions of fried sweetened dough.

• The French word crêpe comes from the Latin for “curled, wavy,”

• The English word pastry, Italian pasta, and French pâte and pâté all go back to a suggestive group of ancient Greek words having to do with small particles and fine textures:

• Couscous is an elegantly simple pasta that appears to have been invented by the Berber peoples of northern Algeria and Morocco between the 11th and 13th centuries.

• Gnocchi — the word is Italian and means “lumps” — got their start in the 1300s as ordinary dumplings made from bread crumbs or flour (Roman gnocchi are still made by baking squares of a cooked dough of milk and semolina).

• The word sauce comes from an ancient root word meaning “salt,” which is the original concentrated flavoring, pure mineral crystals from the

• The Roman term ius was replaced by derivatives of the Latin salsus, meaning “salted”: sauce in France, salsa in Italy and Spain. In French, jus came to mean meat juices; bouillon was a stock produced by simmering meat in water; coulis was a thickened meat preparation that gave flavor and body to sauces, to potages — substantial soups — and other prepared dishes.

• The French soupe was the equivalent of the English sop, a flavorful liquid imbuing a piece or pieces of bread.

• And the English word gravy appears, derived apparently but mysteriously from the French grané. The latter, whose name derives from the Latin granatus, “made with grains, grainy,”

• Basic Sauce: Brown, or Espagnole, made with brown stock (beef, veal), brown roux, tomatoes Bordelaise (“from Bordeaux”) Red wine, shallots Diable (“devil”) White wine, shallots, cayenne Lyonnaise (“from Lyon”) White wine, onion Madeira Madeira wine Périgueux (village in Perigord region) Madeira wine, truffles

• Sauce: Velouté (“velvety”), made with white stock (veal, poultry, fish), yellow roux Allemande (“German”) Egg yolks, mushrooms White Bordelaise White wine, shallots Ravigote (“invigorated”) White wine, vinegar Suprême Poultry stock, cream, butter

• Sauce: Béchamel (a gourmand), made with milk, white roux Crème Cream Mornay (a family) Cheese, fish or poultry stock Soubise (army commander) Onion puree

• Basic Sauce: Hollandaise (“from Holland”), made with butter, eggs, lemon juice, or vinegar Mousseline (light cloth) Whipped cream Béarnaise (“from Béarn”) White wine, vinegar, shallots, tarragon

• Flavor is mainly a combination of two different sensations, taste and smell.

• An emulsifier is a substance of some kind that coats the oil droplets and prevents them from coalescing with each other.

• As a general rule, then, a thin sauce will have a more intense and immediate flavor than the same sauce with thickeners added. But the thickened sauce will release its flavor more gradually and persistently.

• The word stock as it’s applied in the kitchen reflects the professional cook’s approach to sauce making. It derives from an old Germanic root meaning “tree trunk,” and has more than 60 related meanings revolving around the idea of basic materials, sources, and supplies.

• Much more specific and ancient is broth, which goes back to 1000 CE and a Germanic root bru meaning “to prepare by boiling” and the material so prepared, both it and the boiling liquid. Bouillon and brew are related terms.

• Slowly simmered until it’s reduced to a tenth its original volume, stock becomes glace de viande, literally “meat ice” or “meat glass,” which cools to a stiff, clear jelly.

• Intermediate between stock and glace is demi-glace or “half-glace,” which is stock simmered down to 25–40% of its original volume, often with some tomato puree or paste to add flavor and color, and with some flour or starch to supplement its lower gelatin content (10–15%).

• Because fish flavor deteriorates quickly, it’s important that fish stock or fumet be made with very fresh ingredients.

• A homely version of the meat aspic is boeuf à la mode, a pot roast braised in stock and wine along with a veal foot, then sliced and embedded in the strained jelly made by the cooking liquid. Chauds-froids are meat or fish jellies that include cream.

• Gel and jelly, words for a fragile solid that is largely water, and gelatin, the name of the protein that can gel water into a solid, all come from an Indo-European root meaning “cold” or “to freeze.”

• In the code formalized by Auguste Escoffier in 1902, there are three leading mother sauces that are thickened in part with flour: the stock-based brown and white sauces, or espagnole and velouté; and the milk-based béchamel.

• The word puree, meaning thoroughly crushed fruits, vegetables, or animal tissue, comes ultimately from the Latin purus, meaning “pure.”

• The Italian puree of basil leaves, pesto genovese, also contains olive oil and so is partly an emulsion as well. Pesto takes its name from the same root that gives us pestle, and the basil leaves and garlic were traditionally ground with a pestle and mortar.

• Such a dispersion of one liquid in another is called an emulsion. The word comes from the Latin for “to milk out,” and referred originally to the milky fluids that can be pressed from nuts and other plant tissues.

• Bouillabaisse is a Provençal fish soup that takes advantage of gelatin’s thickening and emulsifying properties. It’s made by cooking a variety of whole fish and fish parts, some of them bony and gelatin-producing rather than meaty, in an aromatic broth with some olive oil.

• The French beurre noisette and beurre noir, or “hazelnut” and “black” butters, are such browned butters, often made into a temporary emulsion with lemon juice and vinegar respectively.

• The French sauce beurre blanc probably evolved from the practice of enriching cooking liquids with butter. It’s made by preparing a flavorful reduction of vinegar and/or wine, then whisking pieces of butter into the reduction.

• Preparation closely related to beurre blanc is beurre monté, “worked up” or “prepared” butter, which is simply an unflavored beurre blanc made with an initial dose of water rather than vinegar or wine.

• The Provençal aïoli and Greek skorthaliá are emulsified with a combination of pounded garlic and cooked potato; garlic and bread are also used, as are fresh cheeses.

• Salary, from the Roman practice of paying soldiers in salt; worth his salt; salt of the earth),

• Unrefined French salts are called sel gris, “gray salt”).

• Fleur de sel, literally “flower of salt,” meaning the finest and most delicate, is a special product of the sea-salt beds of west-central France.

• The English word sugar comes from the Arabic imitation of the Sanskrit sharkara, meaning gravel or small chunks of material; candy from the Arabic version of the Sanskrit for sugar itself, khandakah.

• Taffy or toffee, from the Creole for a mixture of sugar and molasses, and nougat, from the vulgar Latin for “nut cake,” entered the language early in the century; fondant, from the French for “melting,” the basic material of fudge and all semisoft or creamy centers, was developed around 1850.

• Caramelization is the name given to the chemical reactions that occur when any sugar is heated to the point that its molecules begin to break apart.

• And honey should not be fed to children less than a year old. It often carries the seed-like dormant spores of the botulism bacterium (Clostridium botulinum), which are able to germinate in immature digestive systems. Infant botulism can cause difficulty in breathing and paralysis.

• Honey comes from an Indo-European root meaning “yellow.”

• Our table sugar is an astonishingly pure 99.85% sucrose.

• Molasses comes from the late Latin word mellaceus, which meant “like honey.” The English term treacle comes via the French triacle from the Latin theriaca, meaning antidotes against poison.

• Caramelization is the cooking of a plain sugar syrup until it turns brown and aromatic. It is similar to the browning or Maillard reactions that give color and aroma to roasted meats, baked goods, and other complex foods, but unlike the browning reactions it proceeds in the absence of amino acids and proteins.

• The name fondant comes from the French fondre, meaning “to melt,”

• The word cocoa comes via the Spanish cacao, which in turn came via the Maya and Aztec from a probable Olmec word kakawa coined 3,000 years ago.

• Chocolate has a more complicated history. The Aztec (Nahuatl) word for cocoa-water was cacahuatl, but the early Spanish coined chocolate

• Best storage temperature for chocolate is a constant 60–65ºF/15–18ºC, without fluctuations that would encourage the melting and recrystallization of the cocoa butter fats.

• The word ganache is French, and before it was applied to a mixture of chocolate and cream, it meant “cushion.”

• Because many people, especially women, experience cravings for chocolate that border on the symptoms of addiction, it has been thought that chocolate might contain psychoactive chemicals.

• Yeasts are a group of about 160 species of single-celled microscopic molds. Not all are useful: some cause the spoilage of fruits and vegetables, some cause human disease

• Alcohol is a drug: it alters the operation of the various tissues into which it diffuses.

• Our words vine and wine come from the same root word, and that word meant the fermented juice of the vine’s fruit.

• The English word grape appears to come from an Indo-European root meaning “curved” or “crooked,” probably referring to the curved blade of the knife used to harvest grape bunches, or to the shape of the bunch stem. Grapple and crumpet are related words.

• Sweet German wines. At about the same time, English importers of white wine from the Champagne region east of Paris discovered that they could make the wine delightfully bubbly by transferring it from barrel to bottles before it had finished fermenting. And a few decades later, the English developed port in the effort to stabilize strong red wines during their sea journey from Portugal.

• It’s estimated that cork taints spoil from 1 to 5 percent of the wine bottles stoppered with cork.

• White wines and light-red rosés benefit from about a year of bottle aging, during which time the aroma develops and the amount of free, odorous sulfur dioxide decreases. Many red wines improve greatly after a year or two in the bottle, and some may develop for decades.

• A bottle of Champagne holds a gas pressure of 3–4 atmospheres, somewhat higher than the pressure in car tires, and contains about six times its volume in carbon dioxide!

• In order to appreciate their sparkle, sparkling wines are best served very cold, around 40ºF/5ºC, in tall, narrow glasses that allow their rising bubbles to be admired for several seconds.

• Name port was originally the English term for any Portuguese wine.

• Sherry Sherry is a fortified, oxidized white wine that was developed in the Spanish port city Jerez de la Frontera, whose name was Anglicized to “sherry” around 1600. True sherry gets its distinctive flavor from the solera system of maturing wine, which was developed early in the 19th century.

• The solera is a series of casks, each initially containing the fortified new wine of a particular year, but not completely filled, so a significant area of wine surface is in direct contact with the air. The wine therefore develops a characteristic intense, oxidized flavor. As the cask contents evaporate and become more concentrated, each is replenished with wine from the next younger cask.

• This lager beer (from the German lagern, “to store,” “to lay down”

• Lager beers are usually best served somewhat warmer than refrigerator temperature, around 50ºF/10 C, while top-fermented ales are served at a cool room temperature, from 50 to 60ºF/10–15ºC.

• Beers worth savoring are poured into a glass, where some of the carbon dioxide gas can escape and moderate their prickliness, and where their color and head of foam can be appreciated.

• German wheat beers may be called Weizen for “wheat,” Hefe-weizen for “yeast-wheat,” or Weissen for “white,” referring to their cloudy appearance.

• Contributes to the final liquid. Sake is also fermented at significantly lower temperatures than Chinese rice alcohols. Beginning in the 18th century, most sake brewing was reserved for the winter months, and this remains largely the case today. The upper limit for sake brewing is around 64ºF/18ºC,

• Sake made to be savored is usually of the grade ginjo, or “special,” in which pure alcohol is the only allowed additive and at least 40% of the rice grain has been removed.

• Mirin is a sweet Japanese cooking alcohol. It’s made by combining cooked polished rice, koji, and shochu, a distilled spirit made from a low-grade sake.

• Bernewyn and brannten Wein, ancestors of our word brandy that meant “burning” or “burnt” wine, appear in German laws about public drunkenness.

• The word distill comes from the Latin destillare, “to drip.”

• Our word alcohol comes from medieval Arab alchemy, which strongly influenced Western science and gave it several other important terms, including chemistry, alkali, and algebra. To the Arabs, al kohl was the dark powder of the metal antimony,

• “Brown” spirits, including brandies and whiskies, are so called because they’re aged in wood barrels, from which they derive a characteristic tawny color and complexity of flavor.

• The two classic brandies are Cognac and Armagnac, the first named for a town and the second for a region in southwestern France, each not far from Bordeaux.

• Some popular examples are apple (Calvados), pear (Poire Williams), cherry (Kirsch), plum (Slivovitz, Mirabelle, Quetsch), and raspberry (Framboise); less widely known are apricot (French Abricot), figs (North African and Middle Eastern Boukha), and watermelon (Russian Kislav).

• Aperitif comes from an Indo-European root meaning “to uncover, to open,” and is a drink to be had before a meal in order to open our system to the nourishment to come.

• Digestif comes from an ancient root meaning “to act, to do,” and names a drink for the end of the meal that will stimulate our system to assimilate the meal’s nourishment.

• Grappa, Marc These are the Italian and French names for spirits distilled from pomace, the residue of grape skins and pulp, seeds and stems left behind when wine grapes are pressed.

• Though it doesn’t look or sound related, the word vinegar comes from the same root as both acid and acetic: the Indo-European ak-, meaning “sharp.”

• The simplest, oldest, and slowest method was perfected in the Middle Ages in the French city of Orléans, where spoiled barrels of Bordeaux and Burgundy wine on their way to Paris were identified and salvaged as vinegar. In the Orléans process, wood barrels are partly filled with diluted wine, inoculated with a mother from a previous batch, and allowed to ferment. Periodically, some vinegar

• True balsamic vinegar, aceto balsamico, is a vinegar like no other: almost black in color, syrupy, sweet, remarkably complex in flavor, and remarkably expensive, all thanks to decades-long fermentation, aging, and concentration in wood casks. It has been made in the northern Italian state of Emilia-Romagna since medieval times.

• Even more fortunate and complex are the reactions responsible for the cooked color and flavor of bread crusts, chocolate, coffee beans, dark beers, and roasted meats, all foods that are not primarily sugar. These are known as the Maillard reactions, after Louis Camille Maillard, a French physician, who discovered and described them around 1910.

• In grilling, the heat source is below the food; in broiling, above.

• Induction heating has two notable advantages over burners and radiant elements. Like microwave heating, it’s more efficient, because all the energy goes into the object to be heated, not into the surrounding air. And only the pot and its contents get very hot.

• It’s true that adding salt to water raises its boiling point, and so speeds cooking. However, it takes one ounce of salt in a quart of water — around the salinity of the ocean — to raise the boiling point a negligible 1ºF.

• Good conductors like copper and aluminum quickly give up heat to their surroundings, while ceramics retain it well.

• They “season” them by coating them with cooking oil and heating them for several hours. The oil penetrates into the pores and fissures of the metal, sealing it from the attack of air and water. And the combination of heat, metal, and air oxidizes the fatty acid chains and encourages them to bond to each other (“polymerize”) to form a dense, hard, dry layer (just as linseed and other “drying oils” doon wood and on paintings).

• Umami (Japanese for “delicious”).