Apparently, quite a few of us would, because the cookbook in question – Modernist Cuisine, by Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young, and Maxime Bilet – already sold out its initial printing, and it hasn’t even hit the shelves yet! Moreover, despite the fact that virtually nobody on Planet Earth has actually touched the 6-volume, 2400-page opus, it’s already been called “the most important cookbook ever”, inducted into the Cookbook Hall of Fame, and generated uncountable words in the foodie blogosphere, including tweets by Thomas Keller and just about every other important chef you can think of.
Unsurprisingly, the authors have their naysayers, most of whom argue that the project embodies the worst of foodie pretensions, but I don’t agree: first, because the thing wasn’t really written for you or me, it was written because the authors believed that the stuff between the covers needed writing-down; and second, whether or not the book even makes money is beside the point, because its main sponsor is Mr. Myhrvold, a former CTO of Microsoft, accomplished chef in his own right, and the sort of guy who could drop the GDP of a small Caribbean nation without noticing that his bank balance had fallen.
As I understand it, the tome is much less a cookbook than an attempt to codify everything we’ve learned in the culinary regime of cooks like Ferran Adria, Thomas Keller, and Heston Blumenthal. In many respects, Modernist Cuisine aims to be nothing less than the 200-year coda to Careme’s 1833 masterpiece, L’Art de la Cuisine Française, a book still broadly considered to be the first serious attempt at collecting the entire state of the culinary arts in one place, at one time.
If you’re still left wondering who the book was written for, the authors make an impassioned case that modernist techniques are relevant for home cooks as well as serious professionals, although they remain uncompromising in their approach, despite its inherent complexities. While I applaud their enthusiasm, and greatly respect their refusal to cut corners, I still suspect that 36-hour hamburger recipes and other feats of culinary wonder requiring medium-sized laboratories full of highly specialized equipment may not be for everyonene:
Finally, as to why the thing costs so damn much, the six-volume, 2,438-page set contains 3,126 photos on art-quality paper and a kitchen-proof plastic-coated manual, took a team of over 50 people more than five years to produce, and weighs more than my kindergartener. From the little I know about bricks-and-mortar publishing, the economic and logistical obstacles alone decry virtually every survival instinct of the industry, so I don’t necessarily object to the price per se. And I’d be disingenuous if I didn’t admit to an existential appreciation of the project – like a threatened species from some remote warren of the world that I’ll never visit, I still feel better just knowing that it’s there. But as to shelling out $625 for food porn, I’m just not sure…