The Compleat Further Reading

The Compleat Further Reading

The whole compendium was a magpie's work, and these are the greatest of its nests: a starting shelf to keep beside this one, gathering the science, the classic craft, the world's own cooks, and the modern teachers — enough that a curious reader could begin the journey again and never run short.

The presiding science and craft —

• **Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (1984; revised 2004)** — the indispensable single volume, and the presiding spirit of this whole compendium: the book that taught a generation of cooks that the kitchen is a laboratory anyone may enter.
• **Auguste Escoffier, Le Guide Culinaire (1903)** — the codification of classical French technique, the mother sauces and the brigade; the grammar from which much of professional Western cooking still descends.
• **Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle & Simone Beck, Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961)** — the book that carried that grammar into the home kitchen with patience and joy, and proved that ambitious cooking could be taught to anyone willing to pay attention.
• **Samin Nosrat, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking (2017)** — the modern distillation: not a book of recipes but of the four variables a cook actually tunes, and the clearest recent argument that understanding beats memorising.
• **Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation (2012)** — the definitive and generous field guide to cooking with microbes, and the book that did most to carry the ferment-crock from folk practice back to the centre of the curious kitchen.

The founding literature of the table —

• **Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste (1825; M.F.K. Fisher's translation, 1949)** — where the West first began to think seriously, and merrily, about eating; two centuries on, still the wittiest defence of the well-attended table.
• **M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating (1954)** — the omnibus of the writer who made food writing into literature, and from whose pages this volume takes its epigraph; proof that hunger, well described, contains everything else.

The great teachers of a cuisine —

• **Elizabeth David, French Provincial Cooking (1960)** — the writer who, after the grey years of rationing, changed the way the English-speaking world shopped, cooked and imagined a meal.
• **Marcella Hazan, The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (1992)** — the plainest and most exacting teacher of Italian home cooking, who proved that restraint is a technique.
• **Claudia Roden, A Book of Middle Eastern Food (1968)** — scholarship, memory and appetite braided together into a cuisine's first great record in English.
• **Madhur Jaffrey, An Invitation to Indian Cooking (1973)** — the book that taught the West the grammar of the spice, and that a curry is not one thing but a thousand.
• **Fuchsia Dunlop, Every Grain of Rice (2012)** — the most rigorous Western writer on the Chinese kitchen, and the surest home-cook's guide to the wok and its breath.
• **Jane Grigson, Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book (1978)** — the seasonal, whole-ingredient kitchen set down with learning and warmth, decades before it was fashionable.

The modern laboratory —

• **Niki Segnit, The Flavour Thesaurus (2010)** — a modern map of which flavours marry and why, and a licence to stop following recipes and start composing.
• **J. Kenji López-Alt, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science (2015), and Nathan Myhrvold et al., Modernist Cuisine (2011)** — the two poles of the science-driven kitchen, the one testing everyday technique to destruction, the other charting the frontier; McGee's inheritance, carried into the age of the immersion circulator.

And, for the reader who would begin the whole journey again — the seven volumes of this compendium:

• **Volume I — The Secrets of Flavour** — what taste actually is: the five tastes, umami, aroma, and the chemistry of the brown crust.
• **Volume II — The Science of Nourishment** — what a meal becomes inside the body: digestion, nutrition, and the long work of being kept alive.
• **Volume III — Fire, Ferment and Transformation** — the two great powers, heat and the microbe, by which the raw is made into food.
• **Volume IV — The World's Great Tables** — the grand tour: how every people alive has built its own complete answer to hunger.
• **Volume V — The Glutton Club** — curiosity carried to the edge of the plate, and the ethics that keep it honest.
• **Volume VI — In Praise of Garlic** — a whole compendium found inside a single bulb, closely enough attended.
• **Volume VII — The Complete Kitchen** — the doing: everything the six books loved, at last brought to the stove.