On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen

In practice, most cooks keep their flavorings at room temperature. As long as they aren’t regularly exposed to strong light, whole spices keep well for a year, and ground spices for a few months.

agriculture drastically reduced the variety of plant foods in the human diet. Millennia later, industrialization reduced it even further. Fruits and vegetables became accessory, even marginal foods in the modern Western diet. Only recently have we begun to understand how the human body still depends for its long-term health on a various diet rich i... See more

There are two basic facts to keep in mind when thinking about the aroma of any food. First, the distinctive aromas of particular foods are created by specific volatile chemicals that are characteristic of those foods. And second, nearly all food aromas are composites of many different volatile molecules. In the case of vegetables, herbs, and spices... See more

The vegetables and water are simmered uncovered (to allow evaporation and concentration) for no more than an hour, after which it’s generally agreed that the stock flavor ceases to improve and even deteriorates. Once the vegetables are strained out, the stock can be concentrated by boiling it down.

The flavors of herbs and spices are defensive chemical weapons that are released from plant cells when the plant is chewed on. Their volatility gives them the advantage of counterattacking through the air, not just on direct contact, and of being a warning signal that can train some animals to be deterred by smell alone.

And produce is often eaten raw. Salad bars in restaurants and cafeterias can collect and grow bacteria for hours, and have been associated with many outbreaks of food poisoning.

Foods are mostly built out of just four kinds of molecules—water, proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. And their behavior can be pretty well described with a few simple principles. If you know that heat is a manifestation of the movements of molecules, and that sufficiently energetic collisions disrupt the structures of molecules and eventually break... See more

Though we tend to think of a particular herb or spice as having its own distinctive flavor, it too is always a composite of several different aroma compounds.

It’s the nature of fruit to taste good, to appeal to our basic biological interests, while vegetables stimulate us to find and create more subtle and diverse pleasures than fruits have to offer.