Harold McGee

Harold McGee
Harold McGee at a book signing in Washington, D.C., 2010.
Born	Harold James McGee (1951-10-03)October 3, 1951[1]
Nationality	United States
Fields	Cooking Chemistry Food science Kitchen science Molecular gastronomy
Alma mater	California Institute of Technology (BS) Yale University (PhD)
Thesis	Keats and the Progress of Taste (1978)
Doctoral advisor	Harold Bloom[2]
Known for	On Food and Cooking[3][4]
Influences	Nicholas Kurti[5][6]
Influenced	Alton Brown Russ Parsons Shirley Corriher Heston Blumenthal[7] Lynne Rossetto Kasper
Website www.curiouscook.com

Harold James McGee (born October 3, 1951) is an American author who writes about the chemistry and history of food science and cooking. He is best known for his seminal book On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen initially published in 1984^[3] and revised in 2004.^{[8][9][10][11][12]}

Education

Harold McGee tastes surstromming (Swedish fermented herring) at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, 2010

McGee was educated at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), initially to study astronomy,^[4][13] but graduating with a B.S in Literature in 1973. He went on to do a Ph.D on the romantic poetry of John Keats supervised by Harold Bloom at Yale University, graduating in 1978.^[2][12]

Career

Before becoming a food science writer McGee was a literature and writing instructor at Yale. A greatly revised second edition of On Food and Cooking was published in 2004. McGee has also written for Nature,^{[5][14][15][16][17][18]} Health, The New York Times, the World Book Encyclopedia, The Art of Eating, Food & Wine, Fine Cooking, and Physics Today^[19] and lectured on kitchen chemistry at cooking schools, universities, The Oxford Symposia on Food and Cookery, the Denver Natural History Museum and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

McGee also consults for restaurants and manufacturers. Currently, he writes a regular column for the New York Times, The Curious Cook, which examines, and often debunks, conventional kitchen wisdom. Along with Dave Arnold and Nils Norén, he also teaches a three-day class at The French Culinary Institute in New York City entitled the Harold McGee Lecture Series.^{[20][21][22][23]}

Awards and honors

McGee is a visiting scholar at Harvard University.^[4] His book On Food and Cooking has won numerous awards and is used widely in food science courses at many universities. McGee's scientific approach to cooking has been embraced and popularized by chefs and authors such as Heston Blumenthal, David Chang,^[7] Alton Brown, Shirley Corriher, Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Russ Parsons.

References