Modernist Cuisine: The Art & Science of Cooking
When someone has so much money, that he doesn`t know what to do with them, then arise this kind of things. Billionaire Nathan Myhrvold decided to play around in the cuisines flows. For three years the former Microsoft (MSFT) chief technology officer has been on a mission to write, edit, photograph, and publish the world’s most comprehensive cookbook. And, the result is Modernist Cuisine, a six-volume, 2,400-page, 48-pound, $625 compendium of contemporary cooking techniques that Myhrvold will publish in March.
To call inventor Nathan Myhrvold’s “Modernist Cuisine: The Art & Science of Cooking”, on sale next month, a “cookbook” is akin to calling James Joyce’s “Ulysses” “a story.” The book is a large-scale investigation into the math, science and physics behind cooking tasks from making juicy and crisp beer-can chicken to coating a foie-gras bonbon in sour cherry gel. There is precedent in this genre-science writer Harold McGee has published popular books explaining kitchen science, and chefs Thomas Keller and Ferran Adria have written about sous vide and other techniques of avant-garde gastronomy-but nothing reaches the scope and magnitude of Mr. Myhrvold’s book.
The book puts traditional cooking wisdom under scientific scrutiny, destroying old assumptions and creating new cooking approaches. Modernist Cuisine will probably attract professional chefs, but it can also be interesting even for the humblest home cooks to improve their meals.
Nathan Myhrvold is the inventor of hundreds of patents (he invented an electromagnetic car engine and is seeking a patent for his French fries treated with starch and placed in an ultrasonic bath). Most of his life, he was devoted to math and science—by the age of 23, he held two master’s degrees and a doctorate in mathematical physics from Princeton—in the 1990s, his passion for food began to loom large.
First, he got deeply into barbecue (he was on the “team of the year” at the Memphis World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest in 1991), and then in 2007, Myhrvold created the Cooking Lab, a private company housed within IV, devoted almost entirely to the production—and documentation—of modernist cuisine. He employed dozens of cooks, writers, editors, photographers, and designers and deployed them in what he called the best kitchen in the world. So modestly, isn`t it? And now, Mr. Myhrvold decided to self-publish through his publishing company, the Cooking Lab, because publishers balked over the size and scope of the project. They should be shamed!
If you have extra $625 buy this book and enlarge the already excessive wealth of Mr. Myhrvold! [Modernist Cuisine]
Modernist Cuisine Authors: Maxime Bilet, Chris Young and Nathan Myhrvold
