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The Art Of Science

In understanding the why of cooking, it only gets better

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WHITNEY STENSRUD / THE SEATTLE TIMES WHITNEY STENSRUD / THE SEATTLE TIMES

THREE HUNDRED years ago, the Romantic poet John Keats famously accused Sir Isaac Newton of "unweaving the rainbow," and one of the great rifts between science and art was formed.

I learned this from Harold McGee in April, on the very day he received a Cookbook Award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) for the newly revised "On Food and Cooking, the Science and Lore of the Kitchen."

Over lunch before the awards ceremony, McGee and I talked about everything from Newton and Keats to the limitations of ultra-pasteurized cream, and I learned more in that hour than I ordinarily learn in a day.

I learned, for instance, that Harold's mother was born and raised in India. His grandfather was a British soldier who, as a young man, preferred the security of army life to the hard-scrabble existence of a shepherd; he enlisted just in time to be sent to Dublin to suppress an uprising in 1918 before being sent to India.

"By the time I met my grandfather," McGee said, "he was back in England." As a teenager visiting his grandfather, McGee learned how to drink and how to choose his words carefully. Once the two of them came stumbling home from a pub to his grandmother's house, obviously intoxicated. "There was a winding path toward the house," says McGee. "I think he fell first, and I tried to help him up." When the grandmother demanded to know what was going on, the old man told his wife, "We were having a conference among the cabbages."

I first encountered McGee's wonderful book, the original edition of "On Food and Cooking," when I was a student, shortly after I changed my major from English and started pursuing a bachelor of science in community health. By day, I attended lectures on chemistry and biology; by night, I worked in a restaurant. McGee's book, with its encyclopedic entries on everything from cabbages to chemical additives, offered a bridge between what I was learning at school and what I was doing at the stove.

As a passionate young cook, I believed that attention paid in the kitchen would be rewarded with attention paid at the table. To me, it was all a matter of heightened consciousness. As I whisked my béarnaise sauce and contemplated McGee's seven-page discussion of emulsion sauces, I imagined chemical bonds being formed in the saucepan. Once, trying to explain how an emulsified sauce was held together, I gave up on the scientific explanation and told a co-worker, "It's all about paying attention. Unless you send your soul into the sauce, it won't hold together."

In the same way that an attentive cook wills a sauce to come together, McGee's attention to the food world has brought the science and art of cooking together.

The award his book received was in the reference/technical category. But to those who know him, McGee is as much a poet as a scientist, as romantic as he is pragmatic. Before he wrote about food, McGee earned degrees in physics and astronomy, but also in English literature, and he taught literature and writing at Yale. He once wrote a thesis called "Keats and the Progress of Taste."

"I wanted to understand how Keats made his poetry," says McGee, "to know how he shaped himself as an artist." Studying Keats, McGee came to realize that in the late 17th and early 18th century, poets and artists were threatened with the reduction of the world into so many scientific parts.

"I think when I wrote the first book, only scientists were interested in food science." But it turned out that everyone was becoming more and more interested in food and, as they learned to cook, people wanted to understand more about where the food came from, what cooking methods worked best for which foods and how it all worked together. When the original "On Food and Cooking" appeared in 1984, it came out in a tentative run of 7,500 copies. According to McGee, hardly anyone acknowledged it; "the food world did not seem interested." Twenty years later, all that has changed. The book jacket of the new edition is peppered with praise from luminaries throughout the culinary firmament.

Rose Levy Beranbaum, author of "The Bread Bible," calls him "our philosopher king of cooking." Charlie Trotter, Jacques Pépin, Madeleine Kamman and Thomas Keller all weigh in.

"When I was just out of school," says McGee, "I imagined that I would write a series of books about the science of everyday life. After the book on food, I would move on to gardening and then maybe the weather." But the first book, the one on food, was followed by another, more personal work on the same subject, and "The Curious Cook" was a best seller.

"There was a tremendous growth of interest in food between 1984 and 2004. I think I was lucky to get on the wave when I did," McGee says. "I thought the revision would include mostly material from the first edition, but I found that so much had changed, and the words on the page sounded like someone who was no longer me."

Finishing this book, admits McGee, "has been very hard. I've had to wonder if I was using my work, using the business of everyday life, to avoid thinking about bigger things. I am turning 50, and I have to wonder, why am I not having more of those moments of awe?"

When I watched McGee accept his IACP award after we had talked, I hoped he was having one of those moments of awe, or at least a moment of profound gratification. "When Newton unrolled the rainbow," says McGee, "the rainbow was still there. Knowing how it's produced does not detract from the experience. Knowing just makes it better."

Greg Atkinson is a contributing editor for Food Arts magazine and a culinary consultant. He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com. Whitney Stensrud is The Seattle Times assistant art director.