What Is Cooking

Lexical semantics and taxonomic hierarchy come to bear in this strikingly illustrated though scholarly appreciation of cooking. Spain’s elBullifoundation, a culinary academy and think tank led by Chef Adrià has, as one of its central missions, worked to create a massive gastronomic encyclopedia, of which this book is part. Over the span of nine exhaustive chapters, the most basic elements of cooking are defined, diagrammed, and brought together. Pedagogic clarifications deal with such matters as the difference between a food and a beverage (“Drinking should not always be associated with a drink or beverage, given that food can also be drunk”) as the authors deconstruct, among other things, what it means to cook (“Humans cook to feed themselves... they also cook for enjoyment, out of hedonism”). Typical of the mind-numbing entries is a six-page analysis of what constitutes raw vs. unraw that includes a complex visual mapping of the terms’ contextualization. Among the book’s other 1,000 visuals are photo arrays that help demonstrate the differences between concepts like sweet and savory, and solid and liquid. Not for home cooks, this detailed and dense volume will appeal to theoreticians who like to consider their food along with flowcharts. (July)