Modernist Cuisine

Modernist Cuisine - The Ultimate Cookbook. A mere $625 or UK£395 will buy you 6 volumes and 2,438 pages of everything you ever wanted to know about cooking. When I first saw this reviewed, I thought it was an April Fool joke. It isn't. It's as serious about food as you can get. An extract of the review from 'The Independent' says: 'Two of its authors, Chris Young and Maxime Bilet, are young alumni of The Fat Duck. (Heston Blumenthal's restaurant) But the main mover and shaker behind the project is Nathan Myhrvold, a bearded inventor and polymath about whom techies and foodies speak with hushed and awestruck amazement. He was the first "chief technology officer" at Microsoft, who graduated to "chief gastronomic officer" at Zagat Surveys, publishers of the famous guidebooks. A Microsoft multi-billionaire, 18-carat wiggy genius (he worked with Stephen Hawking on quantum theories of gravity while doing postgraduate work at Cambridge), he has visited the world's top restaurants and, magpie-like, picked up all manner of secrets from their cutting-edge chefs. So, having harvested the world's expertise about food, he has been busily turning it into "modernist" cooking and publishing the result in a boringly titled but gargantuanly promoted chef d'oeuvre.' So now you know. For the full review, see: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/a-feast-for-the-eyes-inside-the-worldrsquos-most-incredible-cookbook-2264842.html Check out the website http://modernistcuisine.com/ Order online if you have the interest and the cash – but you might not get a copy – apparently, supplies are limited. Not being a Microsoft multi-billionaire I might wait for the second-hand paperback version on Amazon, but it does sound like it would be interesting to leaf through… The photos and explanations of techniques and cooking processes are said to be fantastic. At that price, they should be!