a b McGee, Harold James (1978). Keats and the Progress of Taste (PhD thesis). Yale University. ProQuest 302889235. Milk has long been synonymous with wholesome, fundamental nutrition, and for good reason: unlike most of our foods, it is actually designed to be a food. As the sole sustaining food of the calf at the beginning of its life, it's a rich source of many essential body-building nutrients, particularly protein, sugars and fat, vitamin A, the B vitamins, and calcium. The Sheep The sheep, Ovis aries, was domesticated in the same region and period as its close cousin the goat, and came to be valued and bred for meat, milk, wool, and fat. Sheep were originally grazers on grassy foothills and are somewhat more fastidious than goats, but less so than cattle. Sheep's milk is as rich as the buffalo's in fat, and even richer in protein; it has long been valued in the Eastern Mediterranean for making yogurt and feta cheese, and elsewhere in Europe for such cheeses as Roquefort and pecorino. How and why did such a thing as milk ever come to be? It came along with warm-bloodedness, hair, and skin glands, all of which distinguish mammals from reptiles. Milk may have begun around 300 million years ago as a protective and nourishing skin secretion for hatchlings being incubated on their mother's skin, as is true for the platypus today. Once it evolved, milk contributed to the success of the mammalian family. It gives newborn animals the advantage of ideally formulated food from the mother even after birth, and therefore the opportunity to continue their physical development outside the womb. The human species has taken full advantage of this opportunity: we are completely helpless for months after birth, while our brains finish growing to a size that would be difficult to accommodate in the womb and birth canal. In this sense, milk helped make possible the evolution of our large brain, and so helped make us the unusual animals we are. I have used Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking whenever I've had questions on the chemistry of food or to understand some aspect of the cooking process." —Jacques Pépin

Cressey, Daniel (2009). "Q&A with Harold McGee: The molecular master chef". Nature. 458 (7239): 707. doi: 10.1038/458707a. PMID 19360069. In the animal world, humans are exceptional for consuming milk of any kind after they have started eating solid food. And people who drink milk after infancy are the exception within the human species. The obstacle is the milk sugar lactose, which can't be absorbed and used by the body as is: it must first be broken down into its component sugars by digestive enzymes in the small intestine. The lactose-digesting enzyme, lactase, reaches its maximum levels in the human intestinal lining shortly after birth, and then slowly declines, with a steady minimum level commencing at between two and five years of age and continuing through adulthood.

Customer reviews

What I'm beginning to realize is just how much knowledge one needs to get their head around, to be a really solid, creative cook. A book such as this is necessarily going to be massive and dense, if it's going to be anywhere near complete. Otherwise it would just be another superficial guide.

It was vastly overstated. It was true, sometimes, of certain nutrients in certain vegetables, but not across the board. Then I talked with some plant physiologists, who explained that plants are very adaptable creatures and if you change their growing conditions they're going to change their metabolism, and it's not all in one direction. Their feeling was that a lot of the things that are useful in plant foods, such as antioxidants, are made by the plant in response to stress."

Table of Contents

qlacross, about one-fiftieth the size of a fat globule. Around a tenth of the volume of milk is taken up by casein micelles. Much of the calcium in milk is in the micelles, where it acts as a kind of glue holding the protein molecules together. One portion of calcium binds individual protein molecules together into small clusters of 15 to 25. Another portion then helps pull several hundred of the clusters together to form the micelle (which is also held together by the water-avoiding hydrophobic portions of the proteins bonding to each other). Harold James McGee (born October 3, 1951) is an American author who writes about the chemistry and history of food science and cooking. He is best known for his seminal book On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen first published in 1984 [3] and revised in 2004. [5] [6] [7] [8] Harold McGee tastes surstromming (Swedish fermented herring) at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. (2010) Early life [ edit ] Now a few words about the scientific approach to food and cooking and the organization of this book. Like everything on earth, foods are mixtures of different chemicals, and the qualities that we aim to influence in the kitchen -- taste, aroma, texture, color, nutritiousness -- are all manifestations of chemical properties. Nearly two hundred years ago, the eminent gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin lectured his cook on this point, tongue partly in cheek, in The Physiology of Taste:

The work is separated into sections that focus on the ingredients, providing the structure for the author to speculate on the history of foodstuffs and cookery, and the molecular characteristics of food flavors, [6] while the text is illustrated by charts, graphs, pictures, and sidebar boxes with quotes from sources such as Brillat-Savarin and Plutarch. [7] The book advises on how to cook many things (e.g., for pasta use abundant water, with reasons and the science behind everything [8] :575-6) and includes a few historical recipes (e.g., Fish or Meat Jelly, by Taillevent in 1375 [8] :584), but no modern recipes as such. [9] See also [ edit ] Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2020-03-04 23:01:03 Boxid IA1789708 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Col_number COL-609 Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Technical innovation has radical consequences on how and what we eat. In the 17th century, cooks discovered that beating egg whites in copper bowls gave body and volume to exciting new foams which they could set as meringues and soufflés. Not much earlier, a very bright cook worked out how to replace a sheep's stomach with a floured cloth for boiling puddings - hello hasty pudding, Christmas pudding, Sussex pond pudding and that entire British repertoire of merry stodge. And a few years later, Denys Papin demonstrated the "digester" or proto-pressure cooker, turning bones to pap in hours. These were big steps, and their like may be multiplied all the way to the microwave and the mechanical blender, but it's not exactly the men-in-white-coats image we now have of kitchen science.

He has the same ambivalence about vitamin supplements. McGee lives in San Francisco, where it's often overcast, and on the advice of his doctor takes vitamin D pills. But, he says, cancer cells need nutrients, and since tablets deliver nutrients without anti-oxidants, he is sceptical about the overall value of taking them. Stafford, Matthew, SF Weekly (November 24, 2004). On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen First a few words about the remaining components. Milk is slightly acidic, with a pH between 6.5 and 6.7, and both acidity and salt concentrations strongly affect the behavior of the proteins, as we'll see. The fat globules carry colorless vitamin A and its yellow-orange precursors the carotenes, which are found in green feed and give milk and undyed butter whatever color they have. Breeds differ in the amount of carotene they convert into vitamin A; Guernsey and Jersey cows convert little and give especially golden milk, while at the other extreme sheep, goats, and water buffalo process nearly all of their carotene, so their milk and butter are nutritious but white. Riboflavin, which has a greenish color, can sometimes be seen in skim milk or in the watery translucent whey that drains from the curdled proteins of yogurt. Interest in food science is not new. The Victorians were agog to read William Mattieu Williams's Chemistry of Food, which went through four editions covering things like albumen, gelatin, casein and the (correct) cookery of vegetables. Food scientists and technologists such as Count Rumford and Justus Liebig were giants of that age. And the appeal of one of our first television chefs in the 1950s, Philip Harben, was his emphasis on the underlying physics of cooking, just as the brilliance of one of Europe's best recipe writers of the last century, Edouard Pomiane, was founded on his scientific training.

For my desires, this book is very close to what I wanted: something that would present information beyond a regular "cookbook" or even a "how-to" guide to technique. Recipes rarely teach me much about cooking fundamentals, and how-to guides don't usually give much information on "why" you do it this way and not that. For me, wanting to actually get good at creating my own dishes, this book provides the sort of more theoretical knowledge I need. This explains everything. Literally. I am so grateful to McGee for his tirelessness, his patience, and his commitment to answering the whys of the kitchen." —Samin Nosrat, author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat The box below shows the nutrient contents of both familiar and unfamiliar milks. These figures are only a rough guide, as the breakdown by breed indicates; there's also much variation from animal to animal, and in a given animal's milk as its lactation period progresses. The Yak The third important dairy bovine is the yak, Bos grunniens. This long-haired, bushy-tailed cousin of the common cow is beautifully adapted to the thin, cold, dry air and sparse vegetation of the Tibetan plateau and mountains of central Asia. It was domesticated around the same time as lowland cattle. Yak milk is substantially richer in fat and protein than cow milk. Tibetans in particular make elaborate use of yak butter and various fermented products. Once upon a time, I was expressing my frustration with books on cooking to a chemist friend -- primarily that most books on cooking treat cooking as this magical art. They presume lots of knowledge on the part of the reader and they give directions that theoretically make the food what it's supposed to be, rarely explaining WHY you want to cook this meat at temperature x or mince this thing instead of slice, or whatever. I wanted something that answered a bit more of the Why?

The basic flavor of fresh milk is affected by the animals' feed. Dry hay and silage are relatively poor in fat and protein and produce a less complicated, mildly cheesy aroma, while lush pasturage provides raw material for sweet, raspberry-like notes (derivatives of unsaturated long-chain fatty acids), as well as barnyardy indoles.