Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking is that rare kitchen reference commonly found in restaurants and homes, the sort of book one can curl up on the couch with or flip through in the heat of cooking battle when you need to know when the oil is hot enough. But McGee wanted to offer cooks an even more useful tome, so he wrote Keys to Good Cooking (Penguin Press, Oct.), which he intends as “a very basic guide” and “a handbook that lives in the kitchen.”
How is this book different from On Food and Cooking?
I heard from a lot of people, both professionals and home cooks, who love On Food and Cooking, but when they had a particular issue in the kitchen, they found it very difficult to find [information on it], in amongst all those pages on natural history, culture, medieval recipes, and things like that. So I got the idea of doing a book that would condense the practical aspects of On Food and Cooking into an easy-to-refer-to volume.
What surprised you when you set out to research Keys to Good Cooking?
One of the things that I’d never imagined doing was revisiting questions about what’s in our kitchens. What’s in our drawers, as far as kitchen tools go? What do we know about heat and how it gets into food? I realized that most people, myself included, never really paused to think about, for example, why it is that when you bake in a home oven and you’re baking at what often seems a pretty moderate temperature, you can still end up with pretty scorched things. How does that happen? A bread oven cooks at 600 or 700 degrees and doesn’t scorch. That led me to look at the oven and realize the heating elements cycle on and off and they’re much more hot than the oven temperature you’re aiming for. If they come on enough [which happens when you open the oven] you can end up scorching food with the heating elements. Understanding how heat works in the kitchen is something that cuts across all cuisines, it’s so basic. It’s kind of the universal ingredient in cooking, but you can’t measure it out in spoonfuls. You have to really think through how it works.
One of the myths you debunk in Keys is that searing meat seals in juices. What are some other common misperceptions?
A related one is that people believe that a moist cooking environment guarantees that whatever food you’re cooking is going to be moist. That’s not true, especially for meats, fish, shellfish, eggs, and dairy products. The fastest way to turn a piece of meat or fish dry is to boil it. You can’t get a moister cooking environment than a pot of hot water, but that’s a guaranteed way to make things dry.
