Harold McGee Visits ChefTalk.com (Dec 10th)

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ChefTalk.com is proud to announce that starting December 10th will we be hosting a one week open forum with Author Harold McGee. Harold is an excellent writer who is most widely know for his book "On Food And Cooking The Science and Lore of The Kitchen". If you would like to participate in this discussion please be sure to become a registered member if you aren't already. Registration is free, but you must register to participate in this online disuscussion.

You can read a wonderfull review of Harold's book by Chef Jim Berman on ChefTalk.com here.


About Harold McGee
Harold McGee writes about the chemistry of food and cooking. He took up this unusual vocation after studies at the California Institute of Technology and at Yale University, where he wrote a doctoral thesis with the prophetic title "Keats and the Progress of Taste." After several years as a literature and writing instructor at Yale, he decided to practice what he’d been teaching, and write a book: a book about the science of everyday life.

The result was the publication in 1984 of On Food & Cooking: The Science & Lore of the Kitchen, a 680-page compendium that brought feature articles in Time and People Magazines and won the Andre Simon Memorial Fund Book Award in Britain. The timing was fortunate: America and Britain were awakening to the pleasures of good food and to the diversity of world cuisines, and On Food & Cooking helped satisfy the growing hunger for information about ingredients and techniques.

Six years after On Food & Cooking, in 1990, Harold published a shorter and more personal book, The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore. In the first chapters, he narrates his efforts to solve a variety of kitchen puzzles. (How much oil can you emulsify into a mayonnaise with one egg yolk? Gallons. Why does frying spatter end up on the inside surface of the cook’s eyeglasses? Gravity.) He then goes in search of the solid principles that underlie the ever-changing scientific evidence linking diet and the major scourges of later life, heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease. And he concludes with reflections about the great gastronomical writer Brillat-Savarin and about the fundamental nature and appeal of cooked foods.

In 2004, after working on it for ten years, Harold published the second, completely revised edition of On Food & Cooking. Along the way he has contributed reviews and original research to the scientific journal Nature, and has written articles for many publications, including The New York Times, The World Book Encyclopedia, The Art of Eating, Food & Wine, Fine Cooking, and Physics Today. He has lectured on food chemistry at the Culinary Institute of America and other professional schools, the Canadian Federation of Chefs and Cooks, at universities, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Chemical Society. He has appeared on CNN and on National Public Radio’s "All Things Considered," "Fresh Air," and "Science Friday." In 1995 he was named to the James Beard Foundation's Who's Who in American Food.



Read more about Harold McGee at his website CuriousCook.com