The Science of Cooking

Last night I watched the movie Julie & Julia. For those of you who don’t know it, a quick summary – it's the story of Julia Child, the famed American cook, intertwined with that of Julie Powell, a woman who in 2002 New York decides to cook her way through Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year and blog about her experiences: 524 recipes in 365 days. That is a lot of butter.

I didn’t grow up in the US so I’m only somewhat familiar with Julia Child. I know she is large and that she sounds British, albeit far posher than me. I’m not even much of a cook, but this movie, among other things, is changing that. My feminist back-brain used to scoff at cooking as a hobby for being too stereotypical. Instead I would do things like fly gliders and become a reserve firefighter (both of these are true by the way) - that I loved makeup and shoes was by the by. My other, far less ideological reason for not cooking was that until recently I had been living in a 250 square foot apartment with only a kitchenette, also known as an efficiency kitchen. The suffix ‘ette’ doesn’t make something cute and deficiency kitchen is probably more apt. It isn’t efficient or fun to make a pumpkin pie in a toaster oven.

I’ve since moved out of what was really a glorified closet and have been finding my feet in a grown-up kitchen with a stove and, glory be, counter space. I’m finally admitting to myself that I enjoy being in the kitchen. But rather than simply wanting to work out some rage issues by whisking ingredients into a frenzy or beating them into submission – as you can see below, Karen wouldn’t let me succumb to such clichés anyway – it’s the science behind cooking that I find fascinating. Call me a fool but I’d never considered that there was a science to it. I just thought that my Nana was really good at cooking and I was mediocre. Julia Child knew that the best bowl for beating egg whites is a copper one. I doubt she knew this was due to copper ions from the bowl forming a complex with a protein in the egg whites, conalbumin, making them much less likely to denature. I bet she didn’t care, but to me it's interesting. So, I shall proceed to cook as if it were a laboratory experiment for it has already taught me two new things – how to make meringue, which I need to know for a pot-luck on Tuesday, and the word ‘denature.’ A contender for next week’s Word of the Week?