How to Read a French Fry: And Other Stories of Intriguing Kitchen Science Book

My major disappointment with this book is that it is essentially a cookbook marketing itself as something else. The chapter text, which is why I picked up the book in the first place, is really quite good. It's a nice, readable version of some of what you would find in Harold McGee's quintessential book, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. Unfortunately, the text is far too short, and instead there is recipe after recipe building upon what you learned in the chapter, which is fine except that there are far too many. The fruit and veggies chapter had something like 15 pages of text and about four times that in recipes. Granted, that's the extreme case, but out of the 300 pages of the book, only about 100 pages of that is actual content of interest.

And it's really too bad - the writing itself is very appealing and well done. But because of this, it touches only modestly on six topics in the kitchen without really even touching probably the single most important one - salt! I really would have liked to see more text, since the author has such a knack for making the science more readable - On Food and Cooking is an incredible resource, but it's not the sort of book you read cover to cover. Unfortunately, neither really is How to Read a French Fry unless you forego 2/3 of the book and its recipes.