Hey, it's Francis.

Harold McGee is one of the truly game-changing food writers of this lifetime.

He really changed how chefs and home cooks think about food.

And here's a whole episode we dedicated to my conversation with him a few years ago.

Enjoy it.

I'm Francis Lamb and this is the splendid table from APM.

When I was in Colonel.

When I was in culinary school, we didn't have many textbooks per se. I mean we did have this

one enormous thousand page cookbook that covered all the basic techniques we were supposed to learn

funny enough almost every chef in the school was like oh it's wrong about that oh it's wrong about that

there weren't a whole lot of you know go home and read chapter 3 kinds of books.

Except for one, that book is on food and cooking by Harold McGee.

I'm not going to lie, it's not necessarily something you would curl up with before bed.

It is full of research about myoglobin and peptide chains,

but what McGee's book did for us, and by us, I mean cooks in general,

is strip away the idea that cooking is a series of actions you do the way you're told

because that's how it's always been done. It opened up the idea that cooking is

actually like everything else science. It's understandable, it's not magic.

If you apply this much heat to this egg, this is what's going to happen. And that knowledge

for generations of chefs to question why they did the things the way they did.

And to break the rules once they learned what the rules were, It opened up so much creativity and innovation,

whether or not you cared for what people call

...