Chapter 19 Further Reading

Resources organized by depth. Mix of books, papers, websites, videos.

Beginner

Joe Yonan, Cool Beans (Ten Speed Press, 2020). A whole cookbook devoted to beans, with strong emphasis on cultural variety and easy home-cook entry. The recipes are excellent; the bean-by-bean profiles are useful for identifying the right bean for a given dish.

Rancho Gordo, The Rancho Gordo Heirloom Bean Project (online catalog and bean club). The premier source of fresh, dated heirloom beans in the US. Their website includes detailed cooking notes for each variety. Read the founder Steve Sando's writing on why old beans don't soften and why heirloom varieties matter.

The Aquafaba Foundation (aquafaba.com). Goose Wohlt's original site, with the history, the basic technique, and a recipe library. A good starting point for understanding aquafaba and trying your first aquafaba meringue.

America's Test Kitchen / Cook's Illustrated, "The Best Way to Cook Dried Beans" (article and video). Their controlled tests on salt-at-start, soaking, and timing. A good demonstration of empirical food testing for the home cook. (Free version on YouTube; full article behind paywall.)

Intermediate

Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (Scribner, 2004). The canonical reference. Chapter 9 (Edible Plants: An Introduction to Fruits, Vegetables, and Herbs) and Chapter 9.4–9.5 (legumes and nuts) cover the chemistry at depth. Reading McGee on legumes is reading the work of someone who has thought longer about cooking chemistry than almost anyone else writing in English.

Kenji López-Alt, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science (Norton, 2015). Chapter on stocks and stews includes the controlled bean experiments that established the salt-at-start finding. His writing on the iterative process of testing is itself a useful model for kitchen experiment design.

Jeffrey Hamelman, Bread (3rd ed., Wiley, 2021). Includes a section on legume flours in bread (chickpea, fava) and their structural effects on dough. For the bread-track reader.

Sandor Katz, The Art of Fermentation (Chelsea Green, 2012). Comprehensive guide to traditional fermentations including miso, tempeh, natto, and soy sauce production. Excellent for the legume-fermentation chapters and the bridge to Part V.

Advanced

Belitz, Grosch, and Schieberle, Food Chemistry (5th ed., Springer, 2009). Graduate-level food chemistry. Chapters on legume proteins and on antinutritional factors (lectins, trypsin inhibitors, tannins, phytic acid) are the standard reference. Use as a reference, not a cover-to-cover read.

Damodaran et al., Fennema's Food Chemistry (5th ed., CRC Press, 2017). The other graduate-level reference. The chapter on "Flavor" covers volatile compounds in roasted nuts and the Maillard reaction in cooked legumes at the level of individual reaction pathways.

Mustafa, R. and Reaney, M.J.T., "Aquafaba, from Food Waste to a Value-Added Product" (Reference Module in Food Science, Elsevier, 2020). A peer-reviewed review of the aquafaba literature, including the protein-composition characterization, foaming kinetics, applications, and standardization questions. The right starting point for someone wanting to dig into the academic side.

FDA Bad Bug Book, 2nd Ed. — Phytohaemagglutinin entry. Free PDF from the FDA. The official US food-safety reference on red kidney bean lectin poisoning, with documented cases, mechanism, and prevention guidance. Required reading for anyone teaching food safety.

Liu, K., Soybeans: Chemistry, Technology, and Utilization (Aspen, 1997). The deep reference on soy. Hundreds of pages on the protein composition, oil chemistry, fermentation traditions, and industrial processing. Outdated in some places (the alt-protein revolution post-2000s isn't covered) but the chemistry is durable.

Cultural and Historical

Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, Jerusalem (Ten Speed Press, 2012). The hummus chapter is the best discussion in English of what distinguishes excellent Levantine hummus from the mediocre version that dominates American supermarkets. The book also covers fava, lentils, and sesame in deep cultural detail.

Madhur Jaffrey, Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian (Clarkson Potter, 1999). A comprehensive global vegetarian reference, with lentil and bean recipes from across the world organized by region. Excellent for understanding how different cuisines treat the same legume.

Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt, The Gaza Kitchen (Just World Books, 2013). Palestinian home cooking, with ful medames (fava beans), hummus variants, and a deep cultural-historical context for legume cuisine in the eastern Mediterranean.

Yemisi Aribisala, Longthroat Memoirs (Cassava Republic Press, 2016). Writing about Nigerian food including egusi soup. For a glimpse of West African seed-stew traditions from a Nigerian perspective.

Web and Video

Adam Ragusea, "Why Beans?" (YouTube, 2020). Accessible 15-minute video on the cultural and nutritional significance of beans. Good for students.

Helen Rennie, "Aquafaba Meringue" (YouTube, 2018). Clear demo of aquafaba meringue technique, with comparisons to egg-white meringue.

The Spruce Eats / Serious Eats — bean and lentil cooking guides. Good practical references with photos and timing for many specific varieties.