Acknowledgments

A book like this is built on top of other books, and other books are built on top of other lives, and at the bottom of the whole stack are the cooks — millions of them, across thousands of years, almost all of them anonymous — who figured out what worked.

I want to thank them first.

Every loaf of bread on every table is a gift from a Neolithic farmer somewhere in the Fertile Crescent who first noticed that wet, abandoned grain would rise. Every wheel of cheese is a gift from a herder who figured out that milk in a stomach pouch became something better. Every cup of coffee, every square of dark chocolate, every spoonful of fish sauce, every fold of pickled cabbage — these are inheritances. They were gifts from cooks in Mesoamerica, in West Africa, in Korea, in the Levant, in southern China, in the Andes, in Eastern Europe, in the Caribbean, in Southeast Asia, in dozens of places where someone tried something and remembered, and taught a daughter, and a son, and a friend down the road. The science I name in this book — Maillard reactions, lactic-acid fermentation, controlled coagulation, polymorphic crystallization — is the formal vocabulary for a body of practical knowledge that humanity built collectively, over generations, long before there were laboratories with microscopes. Whatever I have done in these pages, I have not invented any of it. I have, at best, named what cooks already knew.

I want to thank the food-science writers who came before me, and whose books made this one possible.

Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking is the canonical reference of our field. Every food scientist of my generation grew up with its blue-and-white cover on a shelf within arm's reach. McGee did the harder work — the patient, decades-long synthesis of scattered scientific literature into a single coherent reference — and the rest of us are operating in the space he opened. I have cited him many times in this book. I have probably absorbed him more often than I have cited him.

Kenji López-Alt's The Food Lab taught the home-cook audience that a digital thermometer and a willingness to test things is most of what separates a great cook from an average one. His work is the model for the experimental rigor I have tried to bring to the Kitchen Labs in this book. The way Kenji writes about heat transfer in a cast-iron pan — affectionately, exactly, with citations — is the tone I have aimed at.

The Modernist Cuisine team, led by Nathan Myhrvold and Maxime Bilet, produced the reference that made it impossible, after 2011, to talk about cooking without talking about hydrocolloids, sous vide pasteurization curves, and the polymorphic phase diagram of cocoa butter. Their work raised the ceiling for everybody.

Samin Nosrat's Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is the book I have most often given to friends. Her commitment to the democratic possibility of cooking — that every person deserves to understand their food, that mastery is not gatekept — is the spirit I have tried to honor here. If anyone reading this has not yet read her, do that next.

I want to thank the broader scientific tradition — Belitz and Grosch and Schieberle, Fennema and Damodaran, the editors and authors of Food Chemistry and the Journal of Food Science and Trends in Food Science and Technology — whose painstaking experimental work over the last century is the substrate from which all of us in food writing operate. The graduate-level reference texts are not for everyone, which is part of why this book exists; but the field they encode is.

I want to thank the open-source and open-education movement. The free software movement gave the world the idea that important things — operating systems, encyclopedias, scientific tools — could be built collaboratively, given away, and improved by anyone who wanted to help. That idea, applied to textbooks, is what made this book possible. The CC BY-SA license under which this book is released is itself a gift from the people at Creative Commons who built the legal infrastructure for sharing knowledge. The mdBook tool that compiles these chapters into something readable is itself open-source. None of this would have happened in the world I grew up in, in which a textbook cost two hundred dollars and the publisher decided who got to read it. We live in a different time, and I am grateful.

I want to thank the readers and contributors who will improve this book.

I have been doing this long enough to know that a first edition is, by definition, full of small errors and large blind spots. Some of you will catch a misstated reaction mechanism. Some of you will catch a culturally clumsy framing in a chapter on a tradition I am not part of. Some of you will run a Kitchen Lab and find that it does not work the way I described. Please tell me. The CONTRIBUTING.md file in the repository explains how. The book is licensed in a way that makes your contributions easy to integrate; future editions will be better because of you.

I want to thank, finally, the cooks in my own life, who taught me without trying to teach me. My grandmother, with her caramel pan, who first showed me what attention to a stove looked like. My mother, who sent me into the kitchen as a child to crack the eggs and never once acted as though my mistakes were a problem. The chef I trained under in my first restaurant kitchen, who explained nothing and showed everything, and whose hands remembered the exact temperature of a properly tempered chocolate ganache better than any thermometer in the building. The friends who have eaten my failed experiments. The partner who has eaten more of them than anyone, and is still here.

To all of them — and to the cooks I will never meet, who are reading this now and about to walk into their own kitchens — thank you.

The book is yours. Make something with it.

— Iris Cho