What drives someone to buy a $600 cookbook?

Love. A point that Nathan Myhrvold hammers in early in Modernist Cuisine is that the word amateur comes from the Latin root amare, meaning love. The five volume, fifteen hundred recipe tome encased in a Perspex box is a work for amateurs in the original sense of the word. The professional chef will save the cover price simply for the tables detailing cooking times for sous vide, but there will be no point in doing so if they don’t love it. Why seek perfection otherwise?

I can’t think of a comparative cookbook in history. The easy parallel is the Larousse Gastronomique – the French culinary dictionary that is informative, frustrating and, at times, ludicrous. But Larousse lacks the forensic depth and breadth of Modernist Cuisine, the interlinking between the history and development of food and the individuals that made it happen, and the search for underlying reasons as to why food works the way it does. Modernist Cuisine writes cooking from first principles.

What strikes me is the degree to which the book reads like a blog. It links back to every chef that has had the word "molecular" unfairly slung at them and raises plaudits for other blogs: Cooking Issues, Ideas in Food, and message boards like Chowhound or eGullet. Blogger Pim Techamuanvivit even gets a shout out as an inspiration for a Pad Thai recipe. The culture of sharing recipes and techniques that the Internet engendered is acknowledged and praised. Like most blogs, the prose is as wooden as an engineer’s ancient slide rule. The photos both beautiful and mechanical.

It does feel like a work of old-school patronage, that without the particular whim of author Nathan Myhrvold, this book would have no chance of existing in the form which it does. Myhrvold is the polymath’s polymath; a man who has published papers on paleontology, won the world championship of barbecue and was Microsoft’s chief technology officer. He skydives, trolls for patents, and has funded ventures ranging from finding alien life to researching penguin digestion. He loves to eat and think about it. There seems to be no clear economic reason to build this book and it takes a singular individual to make the kitchen that he did. Sinking hundreds of thousands of dollars into buying rotary evaporators and colloid mills with no clear economic return takes a good degree of zealotry.

The heavy hand of the patron rests upon it and his personal experience of food. A chapter berating the inconsistent rules of the American Food and Drug Administration is only of marginal interest to international readers, alongside the broader topic of what kills bacteria in food. The chapter on coffee seems skewed towards Microsoft’s home town of Seattle. The depth to which barbecue is covered is unprecedented and awe-inspiring. Exact varieties of chilli are rarely specified for any of the Asian dishes but always for the Mexican. There are no desserts apart from ice-cream and no pastry, which was noted as a conscious choice of the authors. Expect volumes six though 10 forthcoming.

Should you buy it?

In the words of Myhrvold:

You might wonder whether this book is meant for professional chefs or home chefs. My reply is, I am a home chef!

Myhrvold devotes six pages to justifying why you should, just in case your friends need a good explanation for buying 23 kilograms of cookbook (pp83-89).

The book makes me want to quit everything, buy a commercial combi oven and add a computer controller to the smoker. It made me feel good at barbecue, traditional roasting and hot smoking. It made me feel inadequate in just about every other method of preparation in the kitchen.

There are recipes in it that are already my defacto approach to the dishes: The pressure cooker stock recipes are simple and bulletproof, and the knowledge around the limits of food safety, especially if you preserve your own fruit and vegetables, is invaluable. After reading the chapter on microbiology, you’ll forever wash your hands properly. There’s even a diagram on doing so.

There are recipes in it that will forever be beyond me. I’ll never cook onion soup in an autoclave, unless I can find a dentist to bribe. I won’t be running pistachios through a colloid mill, which looks far more delicious than it sounds. The recipes are uncompromising and you’ll love it if you’re the sort of person that sees this as a positive.

It plants fertile ideas that spawn obsession and presents techniques with such clarity and often simplicity that I feel driven to feed that mania for perfection; that dark side of the love of food.