food and cookingPhoto: Cooking greens in a pan. Country people may enjoy good contemporary milk, but within the cities, with confined cattle fed inadequately on spent brewers’ grain, most people noticed only watered-down, adulterated, contaminated milk hauled in open containers by way of the streets.

Hosted by the award-winning food author Francis Lam, who took over from longtime host Lynne Rossetto Kasper earlier in February after her 21-yr run, The Splendid Desk shares Milk Road’s traditional radio-journal structure, however underneath Lam’s mild and considerate touch, the show is actually one long, unceasing, ever-iterating meditation on the formation and variation of food culture.

Each caseins and whey proteins are uncommon among food proteins in being largely tolerant of heat. Chapters 14 and 15 then describe in some element the molecules and primary chemical processes concerned in all cooking; and the Appendix gives a quick refresher course within the primary vocabulary of science.

Wetting the pan with water before adding milk will cut back protein adhesion to the steel; a heavy, evenly conducting pan and a average flame assist minimize scorching, and a double boiler will prevent it (though it’s more trouble). It’s very tempting to open the oven to verify on your meals and get a whiff of what’s to return, nevertheless it may cause your meals to be undercooked.

My major source was On Meals and Cooking” by Harold McGee, but this was supplemented by Jamie Goode’s Wine Anorak column, Ricki Carroll’s House Cheesmaking ebook, and frequent trips over to the Cornell Food Science seminar sequence (I keep in mind a particularly good talk by Doug Goff from University of Guelph using microscopy to study ice cream construction).