Eccentric's Corner: Kitchen Conjurer

There's no way to accurately describe what Harold McGee does, because he has blazed a unique trail. "Food chemist" is a common descriptor, and indeed he teaches a highly regarded course on food chemistry at the Culinary Institute of America. But as his monumental On Food and Cooking demonstrates, he is also a poet, historian, and anthropologist of gastronomy. The sharpest tool in his kitchen cabinet? Raging curiosity.

You are sui generis. How did you do it?

By accident, the way a lot of good things happen. I went to Caltech planning to be an astronomer. Partway through I realized I really wanted to study philosophy and literature. I went on to graduate school in literature at Yale and taught there for a couple of years while trying to find a tenure-track position. When things were not looking great, I wondered whether I could recoup my investment in science by writing about it. The big subjects were taken.

How did you hit upon food?

My girlfriend was in biology. We had dinner parties with her biology friends and my literature friends, and often the only subject we had in common was the food. Once, we were talking about the science of food preparation when a friend announced, "I'm from New Orleans. I really like red beans and rice, but why can I have only one or two servings before I begin to suffer?"

PROFESSION: Food chemist/historian/romancer and author.
CLAIM TO FAME: Blog: Curious Cook. Book: On Food and Cooking, the bible of food preparation that has bred a whole new generation of chefs.
Photo © Gabriela Hasbun" />

Harold McGee
PROFESSION: Food chemist/historian/romancer and author.
CLAIM TO FAME: Blog: Curious Cook. Book: On Food and Cooking, the bible of food preparation that has bred a whole new generation of chefs.
Photo © Gabriela Hasbun

PROFESSION: Food chemist/historian/romancer and author.
CLAIM TO FAME: Blog: Curious Cook. Book: On Food and Cooking, the bible of food preparation that has bred a whole new generation of chefs.
Photo © Gabriela Hasbun" />

Harold McGee
PROFESSION: Food chemist/historian/romancer and author.
CLAIM TO FAME: Blog: Curious Cook. Book: On Food and Cooking, the bible of food preparation that has bred a whole new generation of chefs.
Photo © Gabriela Hasbun

So beans were your madeleines?

Exactly. And what my friend wanted, specifically, was a fart chart.

Did you ever do it?

We all cracked up. But I went to the library for information, and I discovered food science. There was Poultry Science. There was the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry. A world suddenly opened that I hadn't known existed. And I found the answer to his question.

How many servings?

Depends on the bean. That's what he wanted, a list of the least offensive beans. It made me think I could put together a book that would be fun, interesting, and useful.

Food science journals are not like On Food and Cooking. Did you sense you were creating a whole new area?

I didn't know what to expect, but I was thrilled by the material I was discovering. Fascinating studies were being published in technical journals that probably had 300 or 400 readers in the world. I couldn't understand why it was terra incognita.

Did the book sell?

Not in the first edition. But my publisher changed hands, and I wound up with the editor responsible for launching the careers of many wonderful food writers. She commissioned a second edition, which took me 10 years to deliver. By that point, the field was exploding. Still, I felt I was discovering a world nobody knew existed except the people who inhabited it, and they didn't seem to appreciate it.

When chefs encounter you, what comments do they pepper you with?

I've come to love their enthusiasm for understanding what they're doing. It wasn't there 30 years ago. The profession of cooking has changed, in the kinds of people in it and their approach to life.

Describe this new generation.

They take an interest in the processes and the raw materials they use. Before the 1980s, cooking was considered more of a craft; no one paid much attention to its theoretical underpinnings. Then came a boom in interest in food and the desire of young people to leap into it. Aspiring cooks wanted to go right from enthusiasm to opening their own place.

How did that change things?

They needed an intellectual understanding that would help them get the practical results they wanted faster than trial and error or the standard career path of apprenticing in a restaurant for 10 years before being allowed to touch a pot. It was a very American thing. My book was a way they could learn fundamentals that would help them shortcut that process.

Where do chemistry and pleasure meet with regard to food?

My motivation was the thrill of making connections between the everyday things we see happening in our frying pans and the larger forces at work in the universe. It's understanding how you get from raw materials to a product that has an effect on our physiology and our memory.

You describe reading Julia Child's explanation for whipping eggs in copper bowls and suspecting that she was chemically wrong but culinarily right.

That was an important moment for me. In Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child instructed readers to beat egg whites in a copper bowl because it acidifies the egg whites and makes them more stable. I knew from basic chemistry that metals don't change the acidity of things. I figured it was probably an old wives' tale.

But you didn't stop at that?

I sprang for a copper bowl and then conducted a test. Sure enough, it took twice as long to produce foam in the copper bowl, but it was much more stable than that made in a glass or steel one.

How did that change things?

Through my wife I got to work at Stanford on a biochemical study of egg whites before and after whipping in a copper bowl. It turns out that there's a protein in egg whites that specializes in binding metals in the developing chick, and it binds copper as well. We came up with a theory about what was going on in the structure of the foam and wrote it up as a letter to Nature. One reviewer said that "the chemistry looks solid, but the subject is a little fluffy."

What fun! So many people find cooking intimidating. Does a book on the chemistry of food make it more so?

Too bad so many people are afraid of cooking. I don't know why they don't just dive in and have fun with it.