Better Cooking through Technology

The former CTO of Microsoft has created a gigantic guide to kitchen science that could transform the way we eat.



To see Modernist Cuisine is to covet it. Which is why, one morning in May, the team that spent six years creating the oversized, over-everything five-volume work came from Bellevue, Washington, to New York City to introduce the wondrous object. And it is why a group of chefs, writers, and TV personalities (so stellar that one guest remarked, "The only other event that could bring these people together is a funeral") gathered at Jean-Georges, the flagship restaurant of Jean-Georges ­Vongerichten, at the invitation of Tim and Nina Zagat. They were there to meet Nathan Myhrvold, the mastermind and financier of a book so expensive to create that he refuses to say how much he spent (other than to say it was more than $1 million but less than $10 million). They wanted to try the pastrami cooked sous-vide for 72 hours, the "tater tots" dunked in liquid nitrogen before being fried, the fruit juices spun in a centrifuge, the mushroom omelet striped with powdered-­mushroom batter so that it looked like a piece of upholstery, with a perfectly spherical, magically just-cooked egg yolk right in the middle. But they really wanted to see the book.

And it is a wondrous object. Modernist Cuisine's five volumes comprise 1,522 recipes and 1,150,000 words of text on 2,438 pages, almost every one of them illustrated with color photography and charts, with dozens of gee-whiz, never-before-seen photographs of beautiful free-form color swirls that could be textile designs but turn out to be life-threatening pathogens; or sculptural objects that could be outdoor art installations but are mussels suspended in clear gelatin; or stunning anatomies of a painstakingly shelled lobster or flayed monkfish or whole chicken; or spectacular cross-section cutaways of pieces of equipment you never thought would or should be sawed in half, like ovens, woks full of hot oil, and kettle grills with white-hot smoldering coals. It weighs 40 pounds, four of them just ink. When Wayt Gibbs, the book's editor in chief, met me later that week in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Toscanini's, an ice-cream parlor and intellectual salon heavy with MIT students and faculty, he painstakingly unwrapped the gigantic carton he had lugged on a portable dolly from Bellevue to New York and then to Boston. The café-goers grew silent and stared at the huge white volumes in their clear Lucite case, one of them later wrote me, as if they were the monolith in 2001.