Ingredients

I picked this book thinking this would tell me how to better think about the flavours and impact of each of the ingredients I put in my dishes while cooking. I see now that it is only tangentially related to that. Even though this is not the book I wanted, I enjoyed it because it was about another thing I enjoy: science.

The author describes in very palatable terms, for someone who has studied secondary science and is fairly enthusiastic about it, the chemical structures of the substances we use and how they interact with the chemical structures of our bodies. The author then goes on to say that this is not useful when we talk about real food which may contains tens of thousands of such chemicals interacting with our bodies. The book describes how such food is actually studied today and what are the pitfalls in interpreting the results.

The book is entertaining and informative and I recommend reading it.