Attractively designed and extensively illustrated with color photographs, line drawings, charts, and sidebars, this contemporary introduction to cooking and food preparation focuses on information that is relevant to today's aspiring chef. Comprehensive and well-written, it emphasizes an understanding of cooking fundamentals, explores the preparation of fresh ingredients, and provides information on other relevant topics, such as food history and food science. This introduction to cooking outlines professionalism, food safety and sanitation, nutrition, recipes and menus, tools and equipment, knife skills, kitchen staples, dairy products, principles of meat, fish and vegetable cookery, garde manger, baking, and presentation.  Exciting, new features to this updated edition include:

• Healthy Cooking chapter (Chapter 23) combines materials on basic nutrition (Chapter 3 in On Cooking, 4^th edition), healthy cooking techniques and cooking for special diets such as vegetarian diets or allergic diets. 
• Over 250 new photographs emphasize procedural aspects of cooking.  Virtually all recipes are now illustrated with photographs.   
• Updated concept changes to meet the Food Code revision (Chapter 20) 
• Fresh design, including over 300 new photographs and line drawings Content updates to reflect current trends in the Culinary Arts

This book is an excellent reference for Chefs, Restaurant Managers and others in the food service industry.

Purée in a food processor or with an immersion blender:
2 cups (660g) butternut squash, peeled, cubed, and roasted (about 1 medium squash)
2 cups (470g) chicken, turkey, or vegetable stock
1 small (130g) yellow onion, diced and sautéed
1/2 teaspoon (1g) salt (adjust to taste)

Notes

• The weights are for the prepared ingredients and only rough suggestions. So, prepare each item individually. For example, for the squash, peel it, then coat it with olive oil, sprinkle it with salt, and roast it in the oven at a temperature around 400–425 F / 200–220 C until it begins to brown. When you go to purée the ingredients, hold back some of the squash and some of the stock, taste the purée, and see which you think it needs. Want it thicker? Add more squash. Thinner? Add more stock.
• This soup by itself is very basic. Garnish with whatever else you have on hand that you think might go well, such as garlic croutons and bacon. Or top with a small dab of cream, some toasted walnuts, and dried cranberries to give it a feeling of Thanksgiving. How about a teaspoon of maple syrup, a few thin slices of beef, and some fresh oregano? Chives, sour cream, and cheddar cheese? Why not! Instead of purchasing items to follow a recipe exactly, try using leftover ingredients from other meals to complement the squash soup.
• If you’re in a rush, you can “jump-start” the squash by microwaving it first. Peel and quarter the squash, using a spoon to scoop out the seeds. Then, cube it into 1–2” / 3–5 cm pieces, drop it into a glass baking pan that’s both oven and microwave safe, and nuke it for four to five minutes to partially heat the mass. Remove from microwave, coat the squash with olive oil and a light sprinkling of salt, and roast it in a preheated oven until done, about 20 to 30 minutes. If you’re not in a rush, you can skip the peeling step entirely: cut the squash in half, scoop out the seeds, add oil and salt, roast it for about an hour (until the flesh is soft), and use a spoon to scoop it out.

There are two broad types of cake batters: high- ratio cakes--those that have more sugar and water than flour (or by some definitions, just a lot of sugar)--and low-ratio cakes—which tend to have coarser crumbs. For high-ratio cakes, there should be more sugar than flour (by weight) and more eggs than fats (again, by weight), and the liquid mass (eggs, milk, water) should be heavier than the sugar.

Consider this pumpkin cake, which is a high-ratio cake (245g of pumpkin contains 220g of water--you can look these sorts of things up in the USDA National Nutrient Database, available online at http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/).

In a mixing bowl, measure out and then mix with an electric mixer to thoroughly combine:
1 cup (245g) pumpkin (canned, or roast and puree your own)
1 cup (200g) sugar
3/4 cup (160g) canola oil
2 large (120g) eggs
1 1/2 cups (180g) flour
1/4 cup (40g) raisins
2 teaspoons (5g) cinnamon
1 teaspoon (5g) baking powder
1/2 teaspoon (5g) baking soda
1/2 teaspoon (3g) salt
1/2 teaspoon (2g) vanilla extract

Transfer to a greased cake pan or spring form and bake in an oven preheated to 350 F / 175 C until a toothpick comes out dry, about 20 minutes.

Notes

• Try adding dried pears soaked in brandy. You can also hold back some of the raisins and sprinkle them on top.
• One nice thing about high-ratio cakes is that they don’t have much gluten, so they won’t turn out like bread, even with excessive beating. With a total weight of 920 grams, of which only roughly 20 grams is gluten, there just isn’t enough gluten present in this cake to give it a bread-like texture. There’s also a fair amount of both sugar and fats to interfere with gluten development.

Take the new Joy for a test-run in the kitchen with these featured recipes for Roast Brined Turkey and Apple Pie, and watch a video demonstration for their recipe for 10-in-One Cookies. And read on for celebrity chef "Odes to Joy," Joy timeline, and Joy trivia.

"Great cookbooks are not just collections of interesting recipes. They are, first and foremost, books that tell a story, the story of how people lived and cooked at a particular point in time. They reveal, to borrow an expression from James Beard, their delights and prejudices, their view of the social order, their appetite for serving others food that meets the expectations of their social class. Food can be anything and everything from fuel to an object of intellectual curiosity to full-bore hedonism that transports the mind and body far from the dinner table with just one overwhelming bite.

I started cooking out of an early edition of Joy when I was only 7 years old. I remember making a basic chocolate cake with 7-minute frosting. The cake turned out fine, but the frosting resembled gruel and was my introduction to the importance of following a recipe to the letter. Evidently my lack of patience and precision had led me astray. But after that first brush with culinary failure, Joy led me to many, many successes over the years; more to the point, I became enamored of Ms. Rombauer's voice, the matter-of-fact charm that led her to suggest "stand facing the stove" as a sensible first step in any recipe.

The amateur but highly evolved enthusiasm that Irma Rombauer brought to the world of home cooking was a breath of fresh air after the slightly earlier era of culinary dowagers Fannie Farmer, Mrs. Beaton, and Marion Harland. To those pillars of culinary wisdom, recipes were shorthand for cooks who had spent a lifetime in the kitchen. A pie pastry recipe might be written as "make a paste." But Ms. Rombauer was there to hold our hands, to put food in a social context and give it attitude, energy, and meaning in a world where food was leaping past the narrow formality of the Victorian age.

For all of our worldly knowledge about ingredients and culinary custom, few cookbook authors have managed to perfectly capture, without artifice or self-conscious chatter, the vernacular of an age. Irma Rombauer introduced us to a room in our home--the kitchen--that was to become a place of enjoyment, not just one of backbreaking labor. She represented the essence of the new American experience, which suggested that everything in life could be transformed into pleasure with nothing more than the proper attitude. And what better way to celebrate this new age than to have a smashing cocktail party with the perfect hors d’oeuvres?

The original Joy of Cooking was mind over matter, the perfect mix of attitude and function. Even as times have changed, the Joy stands out as a watershed volume, a book that speaks to the very heart of who we want to be in the kitchen: producers of our own story, directors of the good American life.

And, according to Ms. Rombauer, all we have to do is take that first easy step and "stand facing the stove." --Christopher Kimball, founder and editor of Cook's Illustrated

"I'm often asked to pick my favorite cookbook. Considering that there are over 3,000 cookbooks published each year, it's a daunting task to try to narrow them down. Speaking as a chef who never went to cooking school, I've been enthralled by certain cookbooks, immersing myself from cover to cover and learning about exotic cuisines from all over the world. But for just plain basic information, both the original and revised Joy of Cooking are still my bibles. I can't tell you how many times my wife Jackie and I have thumbed through the stained and broken-backed copy of Joy in our home kitchen, looking for our favorite angel food cake recipe, our favorite skillet corn bread, our favorite fluffy biscuits, and crisp waffles, and on and on. It's tough to picture my family table--or, in fact, the American table--without a well-worn copy of Joy of Cooking in the background." " --Tom Douglas, author of I Love Crab Cakes!

"I highly recommend this book as a must-have in your kitchen. Chock full of great information, this book takes all of the guess work out and leaves no stone unturned." --Paula Deen, author of Paula Deen Celebrates!






"In our kitchen, Joy of Cooking is a tool as indispensable as the chef's knife, the scale, the whisk. We actually own two copies--a shelf-copy for reading, and one whose sauce-splattered, dog-eared pages bear witness to just how much joy we get from Joy." " --Matt Lee and Ted Lee, authors of The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook





"Joy of Cooking is the ultimate reference guide that I have been using for years. It's timeless and packed with perfect recipes for the home cook that stands up to the test of time." --Tyler Florence, author of Tyler's Ultimate






"Joy of Cooking is a book I turn to whenever I have a question about food or cooking. The new edition is the combined effort of some of the best cooks writing today; I know I can trust its information. And trust is, to my mind, the essential quality of all great cookbooks." --Sally Schneider, author of The Improvisational Cook






"When Andrew first contemplated becoming a chef in the 1980s, he asked two Boston chefs of his acquaintance what books he should read. Each independently recommended Joy of Cooking as THE classic with reliable recipes for just about everything. (The second chef urged him to look for an early copy for the sheer entertainment value of reading how to cook a possum.) A decade later, when we interviewed 60 of America’s leading chefs for our first book Becoming a Chef, we asked them the same question--and again Joy was one of their five most recommended books. In fact, we recommend buying two copies, like we did: we keep our chocolate-smudged copy of Joy in our kitchen, and a reading copy on our bookshelves." --Andrew Dorenburg and Karen Page, authors of What to Drink with What You Eat


"Our Joy of Cooking is dog-eared, flour dusted, chocolate smudged, oil spattered, and easily the most used cookbook on the shelf. The staggering amount of information in the book taught us the basics when we were in our teens and has informed our cooking for the decades since. We wish we had written it!" --Johanne Killeen and George Germon, authors of On Top of Spaghetti




"I received a copy of Joy of Cooking in my late teens. I have treasured the cookbook ever since and still use it frequently as a reference. In the late 80's I was asked to represent American Cooking in Italy. I cooked all over the country for 2 months. The only book I took was Joy of Cooking. When ingredients that I had ordered did not show up and I had to totally wing it, I used this book to get me out of a few jams--like what the proportions are to make your own baking powder! If I could have only one cookbook--other than my own of course!--it would be Joy of Cooking–-as it is the bible of American cooking" --Kathy Casey, author of Kathy Casey's Northwest Table


"I have purchased Joy of Cooking for all my restaurant libraries as well as my own. The recipes always work--always--and the informational chapters are accurate, to the point, and incredibly helpful--couldn’t live with out it!!" --Cindy Pawlcyn, author of Big Small Plates

Now, for its twentieth anniversary, Harold McGee has prepared a new, fully revised and updated edition of On Food and Cooking. He has rewritten the text almost completely, expanded it by two-thirds, and commissioned more than 100 new illustrations. As compulsively readable and engaging as ever, the new On Food and Cooking provides countless eye-opening insights into food, its preparation, and its enjoyment.

On Food and Cooking pioneered the translation of technical food science into cook-friendly kitchen science and helped give birth to the inventive culinary movement known as "molecular gastronomy." Though other books have now been written about kitchen science, On Food and Cooking remains unmatched in the accuracy, clarity, and thoroughness of its explanations, and the intriguing way in which it blends science with the historical evolution of foods and cooking techniques.

Among the major themes addressed throughout this new edition are:

• Traditional and modern methods of food production and their influences on food quality
• The great diversity of methods by which people in different places and times have prepared the same ingredients
• Tips for selecting the best ingredients and preparing them successfully
• The particular substances that give foods their flavors and that give us pleasure
• Our evolving knowledge of the health benefits and risks of foods

On Food and Cooking is an invaluable and monumental compendium of basic information about ingredients, cooking methods, and the pleasures of eating. It will delight and fascinate anyone who has ever cooked, savored, or wondered about food.