Harold McGee

Harold writes about the chemistry of food and cooking. He took up this odd vocation after studies at the California Institute of Technology and at Yale University, where he wrote a doctoral thesis with the prophetic title "Keats and the Progress of Taste." After several years as a literature and writing instructor at Yale, he decided to practice what he had been teaching, and write a book: a book about the science of everyday life.

The result was the publication in 1984 of a 680-page compendium, On Food & Cooking: The Science & Lore of the Kitchen. Timing was lucky: America and Britain were awakening to the pleasures of good food and to the diversity of world cuisines, and On Food & Cooking helped satisfy the growing hunger for information about ingredients and techniques.

Six years after On Food & Cooking, in 1990, a shorter and more personal book, The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore was published. It's currently out of print. Then in 2004, after working on it for ten years, the second, completely revised and significantly expanded edition of On Food & Cooking was published and has won several awards. In 2010, Penguin Press published the practical kitchen handbook Keys to Good Cooking: A Guide to Making the Best of Foods and Recipes.

Along the way Harold has contributed reviews and original research to the scientific journal Nature, and have written articles for many publications, including The New York Times, The World Book Encyclopedia, The Art of Eating, Food & Wine, Fine Cooking, and Physics Today. He taught two-day courses at the French Culinary Institute in New York, and talk about food chemistry at such venues as the Culinary Institute of America and other professional schools, at Madrid Fusion, at universities, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Chemical Society.

He is currently working on a book about flavor, and contributing a column on science and food, "The Curious Cook," to the New York Times.