Modernist Cuisine

Modernist Cuisine consists of six volumes, 2,438 pages, 1,600 recipes, thousands of gorgeous photographs, and took a team of 50 several years to pull it together.

Nathan Myhrvold's (former Microsoft CTO) epic culinary treatise will likely join the top echelon of cookbooks. I'd love to have a copy but at a cost of $462 (the discounted price on Amazon), I think I'll wait until I find one on eBay or at a yard sale.

From Wired...

A chef would have built a kitchen; Myhrvold built the Cooking Lab. He carved out a corner of the Intellectual Ventures lab and filled it with gear—not just stoves and ovens but industrial-grade homogenizers, freeze-driers, steam-heated ovens, and vacuum distillation machines. If Thomas Edison and Martha Stewart built a house, this is what the kitchen would look like...

...It’s almost impossible to comprehend all of Modernist Cuisine. It seeks to be the first and last word in its field, to settle every argument, to capture all of human knowledge about cooking. And, ultimately, it’s a book that utterly reflects Myhrvold. “We had a focus on physics. We had a focus on computer modeling. We had a focus on photography,” Myhrvold says. “Those are all things that I’m completely into. We had a focus on the history and the philosophy of this kind of cuisine. Again, that’s totally what I’m into.” That’s why the criticisms won’t matter too much to Myhrvold. In the end, Modernist Cuisine is more than a cookbook. It’s an autobiography—the world’s most oblique memoir, so accurate a reflection of its creator that he might be the only person in the world who fully understands it.