Serve Chilled

How to Read a French Fry and Other Stories of Intriguing Kitchen Science

Houghton Mifflin, 334 pp., $25

Even though the summer-reading season tends to be dominated by "light, breezy fare" -- glorified airport serials and easily digestible novellinis, mostly -- I like to spend the hot months digging into meaty, functional books. If I'm going to spend my leisure time parked in front of the page, I might as well be getting less ignorant in the process. So summer is my personal time for nonfiction -- most of it food-related and all of it dedicated to filling gaps in an admittedly incomplete culinary education.

And this summer, I dove headfirst into complex food chemistry with Russ Parson's recent book How to Read a French Fry and Other Stories of Intriguing Food Science. Luckily for me (and most nonscientific readers), Parsons -- current food editor of The Los Angeles Times -- bridges the kitchen and the laboratory with a readable style and about 100 illustrative recipes.

In his six broad chapters, Parsons discusses everything from supermarket botany to cell biology to protein dynamics with one eye firmly trained on the everyday dinner table. He starts off with the universally appealing forbidden fruit -- deep-fried potatoes -- for a discussion of oil cookery, thermal measurement, and caramelization, then proceeds through a variety of process- and ingredient-specific topics (vegetable maturation, eggs and emulsion, starch chemistry, and the ins and outs of animal cells). From the raw ingredients to the finished product, our food is beholden to the laws of science (believe it or not). Using plain language, Parsons attempts to demystify it for his readers and make them better cooks in the process.

Parsons' scientific explanations don't skimp on detail -- they're as complete as any sophomore-level lecture -- but the author is also careful to choose his details and metaphors carefully. "Ripeness is not a fixed point," he writes, "but a process. It begins with pollinated flowers forming fruit and ends with rot." With this solid mental hook set, he discusses the complex and varied process known as respiration (put simply, breathing fruit) across a range of common supermarket produce. Parsons describes a world where cell walls collapse as they cook, meat fibers separate before rebonding, and wheat gluten fights back as if it is alive.

Each section begins with the science-intensive explanation followed by a collection of tips and recipes that explain by edible example. Scrambled eggs, studded morels, and asparagus illustrate lessons of hot emulsion sauces while a butter-braised spinach dish uses quick cooking to preserve the plant's bright natural color.

The two narrative forms -- occasionally dense scientific stories and airy, concise applications -- play well against each other and make for an enjoyable, variably paced read. As a cookbook reader, though, my one unanswered wish would be in the design department -- a few well-placed illustrations would have made certain physical explanations come to life. But in their absence, Parsons lets his prose do the heavy lifting, brings science to the kitchen, and makes it useable.