Primary Source #3: Snippets from Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking (1984)

In the era between the gourmet wave and the molecular gastronomy movement, a landmark text of scientific cookery

Mar 19, 2024

On Food And Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen: McGee, Harold: 9780044402770: Amazon.com: Books — I had no idea that this version of the cover existed, but it’s displayed alongside the import edition from Collier Books now available on Amazon…too cool…

As I count down to the end of my dissertation journey over the next six weeks, I’m sharing one of my favorite primary sources per chapter for your reading enjoyment, to encourage you to give it a look and consider each source’s implications. This week, a snapshot from a portion of my third chapter, which looks at the gourmand wave of the 1970s and 1980s, and the resurgence of culinary science from male home cooking authorities in its wake.

In the 1970s and 1980s, American food was clearly in a post-Julia Child era, as home cooking was transformed from a domestic obligation into a consumer brand: home cooking as part of the cosmopolitan lifestyle. Each episode of The French Chef sent avid viewers rushing into their local grocery stores in search of ingredients like shallots, tarragon, garlic, and of course butter, and into department stores searching for the latest in high-end culinary appliances. By the 1970s, the kitchen had become “America’s playroom,” and cooking had become a fully-fledged, highly monetizable hobby. Restaurants, meanwhile, were launching into a new era of experimentation, especially on the West Coast with the rise of counterculture cuisine in the “Gourmet Ghetto” of Berkeley and California cuisine in the hot spots of Los Angeles. By the 1980s, the frenzy had reached New York, as California expats like David and Karen Waltuck, Jonathan Waxman, and Michael McCarty all opened their first NYC-based restaurants. Over a few decades, the restaurant scene in the city evolved from elegant establishments serving classic European dishes to lively venues for broad culinary experimentation, giving rise to a new cooking style known as “New American cuisine.”

Yet this enthusiasm ran counter to what some saw as a necessary reform in American cuisine: a need to pull back and re-anchor home cooking in the fundamentals of culinary science. As women were being seduced by kitchen appliances in the post-war period, numerous cookbooks were pitched at a male readership, assuring men that they could cook with innate creativity and an Eagle Scout-like fortitude that women cooks inherently lacked, allowing them to claim a portion of their homes as a pseudo-worskhop. This new style of what the scholar Steven M. Gelber called “domestic masculinity” exerted a kind of male professionalism and craftsmanship onto feminized spaces such as the home kitchen, reframing the work therein as a new form of serious, productive leisure. As men exited the armed forces and reentered the American home, a masculinized rhetoric of home management emerged to greet them on the threshold. And in the Cold War era, where science, progress, and freedom were symbolically entangled, home management as men practiced was a deeply scientific endeavor.

In 1984, a young literature professor named Harold McGee wrote, “Most writers on food either ignore the scientific principles, high or low, that underlie cooking, or else disparage the value of such information on the grounds that art cannot be reduced to the test tube.” McGee knew about art—he wrote his dissertation on the subjective beauty of romantic poetry—but his extracurricular interests veered toward the objective: the foundational principles of cooking on the cellular level. He found that few popular food publications pushed beyond simplistic recipes or trend pieces, and thought that if home cooks were given a more thorough scientific explanation of the cooking process, they could ask more meaningful questions about their food. Thus, the central premise of On Food and Cooking, McGee’s textbook on food as viewed through the science of cooking, emerged. McGee’s book drew a pedagogical boundary between the inherited beliefs that had governed home cooking for millennia and the tested scientific facts derived from experts in physics, chemistry, and molecular biology. By foregrounding scientific explanations of home cooking, McGee unintentionally offered a masculinized mode of disciplining the home kitchen through the fundamentals of chemistry.

McGee’s work was a partial response to what was already underway in the academy, to bring scientific innovation to bear on home cooking practices. In his 1969 address before the Royal Institutions of Great Britain, “The Physicist in the Kitchen,” the Hungarian scholar Nicholas Kurti called out the elitism of scholars who claimed to dedicate themselves to “improving natural knowledge” while disdaining the application of that knowledge to the domestic sphere. Kurti said that the society’s members did not regard cooking as “sufficiently dignified” to merit scientific research, declaring that he wished the academy was “not only a place where scientists meet to discuss the latest scientific discoveries or developments, but also a place where over a superbly, or at least well-cooked meal they would discuss culinary discoveries and developments.” Kurti foresaw numerous applications of scientific methods in the home kitchen, and argued that science was not antithetical to culinary creativity, but essential to it. As he declared, “I think it is a sad reflection in our civilization that while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus we do not know what goes on inside our souffles.” Kurti called for science to shine a light on the home kitchen, precisely what McGee sought to do.

McGee began On Food and Cooking by addressing the elitist slight against cooking as an unthinking and unintellectual process. The book’s epigraph was drawn from an exchange in Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste between a “professor” and his “cook” in which the professor declared that cooking was “nothing other than the execution of the eternal laws of nature, and that certain things which you do without thinking, and only because you have seen others do them, derive nonetheless from the highest scientific principles.” Therein sat McGee’s central premise: that cooking was not a passive reenactment of natural laws, and too many cookbooks worked to “relieve us from ‘the distraction of having to think.’” By treating cooking as inherently scientific, McGee asserted that learning to cook required active critical thinking rather than passive reception of culinary trends or truisms.

For all his focus on everyday life, McGee’s intended reader was not the average consumer but rather the elevated home cook or “ingenious amateur,” who would appreciate the book’s intense scholarship and distinctly unemotional tone. McGee’s imagined public was fed up with basic recipes and frustrated by their aesthetic excesses and limited explanations. As a result, McGee stated that On Food and Cooking was “not as an alternative to the recipe books, but as a companion to them. It offers few new techniques, but explains how it is that the traditional techniques work.” By seeking out home cooks in search of precise explanations, McGee engaged the ingenious amateur through technique, offering them “the hidden patterns and wonderful coincidences of nature” behind the mystery of cooking. McGee also focused on the problems derived from the “standard practices” of the home kitchen. He was particularly suspicious of tradition; as he put it, “experience, routine, what usually happens: the phrase remains a good description of both the appeal and the limitations of cookbooks.” According to McGee, recipes were far too product- and taste-oriented, when what home cooks needed was an explanation of ingredients, “what they are made of and where they came from, how they are transformed by cooking, when and why particular culinary habits took hold.” By explaining ingredients and processes, McGee’s book aimed to dismantle the “old wives’ tales” governing everyday cooking.

McGee’s most famous intervention debunked the long-accepted theory of searing meat to “lock in the juices.” Like all good scientists with a debt to history, McGee went back to the source, the study of protein reactions under heat transfer as provided by the nineteenth-century German chemist Justus von Liebig. In 1847, Liebig shared his research in muscle chemistry, rooted in the assumption that, as animal tissues carry the same components as human muscles, they had to contain key elements of human nutrition, some of which were water-soluble. Therefore, Liebig reasoned, heating meat at the beginning of the cooking process ensured that juices were sealed inside a crust or shell, allowing it to retain its nutrients. This, McGee stated, was “simply not true,” explaining that any crust formed around the meat was not waterproof. the craving for a “rational” approach was so potent, McGee reasoned, that Liebig’s flawed method appeared in countless texts, including books from beloved culinary authorities like Sarah Josepha Hale and Fannie Farmer. “What accounts for the searing theory’s staying power in the face of straightforward evidence that it is wrong?” McGee asked. Perhaps it was the “the comforting illusion that by taking a simple positive action we are insuring ourselves against at least one culinary disaster. … As long as cooks continue to get nervous about roasts, Liebig’s searing theory will probably flourish.”

Perhaps because of the problems McGee believed inherent to the cookbook format, On Food and Cooking offered no recipes. “I figured that there were plenty of restaurant recipes in the world,” McGee opined, and said that the subject of recipes never came up during the drafting process. Instead, each chapter offered a historical consideration of the “nature” of a given food, its basic chemical composition, and eventually its behavior when subjected to various cooking processes. Discussions of taste were minimal, as were conversations about the social and cultural context for certain foods. Even when McGee offered praise, it was reserved for the “versatility” or “prominence” of a food in human history, depicting himself as uninfluenced by trends or popular tastes. Dishes themselves were an afterthought; science was the main course.

Though its format was unconventional, critics ultimately heralded On Food and Cooking as a pathbreaking text for the culinary world. The initial reaction to the book was somewhat tepid, with many critics dwelling on “the weirdness” of McGee’s emphasis on science. Mimi Sheraton’s 1985 review in Time, however, jolted the book’s reception to life, as she hailed On Food and Cooking as an essential resource for professionals and serious home cooks. Sheraton applauded McGee for separating “the myths from the realities of cooking information,” stating that “a reader with a less scientific turn of mind can skip the theory and get almost as much from the applied information.” As critics embraced the book, they spent little time dwelling on its “forbiddingly technical” language, instead applauding McGee’s refusal to cater to the conventions of food culture. The 2004 edition of On Food and Cooking featured praise from prominent chefs, including Jacques Pépin, Thomas Keller, Paula Wolfert, and Madeline Kamman. (Also offering praise was Shirley O. Corriher, a trained biochemist who consulted on several restaurants and the cookbooks. In a 2003 interview, Corriher noted that she first began teaching the science of cooking in the early 1970s, during a period when “the word ‘science’ used in connection with cooking was the kiss of death. Everybody was into ‘creative gourmet.’” While Corriher was approached to write her own book in 1983, she postponed it for several years due to teaching and lecture schedules, and so may have been scooped by McGee’s earlier publication.) On Food and Cooking remains a foundational text for the Science & Cooking class at Harvard University and a reference for many culinary schools nationwide. Ambitious home cooks alike have since heralded McGee’s opus, what Alton Brown called the “Rosetta stone of the culinary world,” and an essential book of in-depth scientific information.

Though McGee’s book became a cornerstone for many ambitious home cooks, his most extensive readership remains within the culinary community, a profession dominated by men. In an era of food publications designed for the home cook, McGee’s appeal to trained chefs made him a standout even as he intentionally kept a distance from the tastemaking industry. In his New Statesman review, Christopher Driver praised McGee for speaking back to the “prescribing classes, whose livelihood is earned out of what the wisdom of the time thinks is good for you, and who are too busy to peer beneath the surface of the created world and allow the evidence to modify what they do.” Call it “culinary positivism,” or “culinary scientism,” but what garnered McGee the most significant acclaim was his rejection of what was believed to be true about cooking, his promotion of a rigorous scientific approach, and his disengagement with cooking as a form of carework or aspect of domestic life.

By emphasizing a scientific approach to understanding food, McGee asserted a new way of thinking about food that aligned well with prevailing attitudes about the power of modern science to test and jettison the assumptions of the past. McGee was one of the first food writers to draw a clear boundary between informed culinary knowledge and inherited culinary knowledge, and in doing so pushed a specific pedagogical agenda that demanded critical inquiry. Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, male culinary authorities would reframe the kitchen itself as a laboratory, while also stripping it of its historical, cultural, and affective ties. To be clear, I don’t think that McGee’s aim was to remove women’s authority or legacy from the home kitchen, but merely to add a scientific perspective to the mix. However, as the decades wore on, scientific testing, not domestic sentiment, was essential in the kitchen-turned-laboratory, and quickly divided media messages around the home kitchen into two camps: one of precise, technologically and scientifically-informed cuisine and the other of cozy, sentimental cooking.

Does On Food and Cooking occupy a permanent place in your home kitchen? What do you see as the relationship between conventional cookbooks and texts on culinary science? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this interesting tension in late-twentieth century food culture!

French Fries and Martinis

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