Table of Contents

Acknowledgments.; Introduction.; PART ONE: Playing with Food: Experiments.; 1. The Searing Truth: Cooking always squeezes out meat juices.; 2. Oil Drops Keep Falling on My Toque: The fate of spatter from the frying pan.; 3. Simmering Down: Cooking tender meats well below the boil.; 4. The Green and the Brown: How to keep the green color of salads and sauces.; 5. Taking the Wind Out of the Sunroot: Making the Jerusalem artichoke more digestible.; 6. Beurre Blanc: Butter's Undoing: A sauce made by transforming butter back into cream.; 7. Simplifying Hollandaise and Bearnaise: Properly understood, these sauces almost make themselves.; 8. Mayonnaise: Doing More with Lecithin: Mayonnaise can be made with little or no egg yolk.; 9. Persimmons Unpuckered: Updating ancient Chinese methods of artificial ripening.; 10. Fruit Ices, Cold and Calculated: Three dozen fruits, five styles.; 11. The Pleasures of Merely Measuring: Prowling the kitchen with thermometer and stopwatch.; PART TWO: Making the Good Life Better.; 12. Fat and the Heart: Coping with quirky biology.; 13. Food and Cancer: Learning how to improve our odds.; 14. Minding the Pots and Pans: The Case of Aluminum: No metal surface is inert.; PART THREE: Reflections.; 15. The Physiologist of Taste: Science in Brillat--Savarin's classic.; 16. The Saga of Osmazome: The early chemistry of gastronomical pleasure.; 17. From Raw to Cooked: The Transformation of Flavor: Why does the human animal like cooked foods?; Appendix.; Bibliography.; Index.