A review by jackwwang
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking, by Samin Nosrat
4.0
An excellent primer on the PRINCIPLES of cooking. Most cookbooks are just dense compilations of recipes, better used as a reference than to read as a narrative. It is I suppose possible to glean the underlying principles of good cooking from recipes, but one has to read between the lines, like deciphering how to play piano by reading sheet music, it's incredibly difficult and tedious. Nosrat writes the cookbook that most of us home cooks have wanted to read, a clearly written narrative introduction of the general principles that allows you to make something tasty NOT from recipe.
The hand-drawn illustrations are very cute and surprisingly helpful to facilitate visualization of concepts difficult to describe in prose. I can read several pages on julienne and not learn as much as a single drawing of julienned carrots.
Nosrat has a gift for storytelling, she could have given us just the concepts and I would have been happy with just the dry facts just because that information has almost never been packaged in such a straightforward way, but she chooses to add some flavor to her exposition, bringing lessons to life from personal anecdotes (often self-deprecating), and the joy she gets from cooking clearly shines through in her prose.
Highly recommended for all but the most seasoned home cooks.
The hand-drawn illustrations are very cute and surprisingly helpful to facilitate visualization of concepts difficult to describe in prose. I can read several pages on julienne and not learn as much as a single drawing of julienned carrots.
Nosrat has a gift for storytelling, she could have given us just the concepts and I would have been happy with just the dry facts just because that information has almost never been packaged in such a straightforward way, but she chooses to add some flavor to her exposition, bringing lessons to life from personal anecdotes (often self-deprecating), and the joy she gets from cooking clearly shines through in her prose.
Highly recommended for all but the most seasoned home cooks.