Kitchen Science Explained
by Robert L. Wolke
Published by W.W. Norton & Co., Hardback, 350 pages, 20 illustrations. £19.95
There are times when even the least inquisitive cook may wonder 'how do egg yolk and oil combine to make mayonnaise?' or 'are smoked foods cooked or raw?' or 'have I burned off all the alcohol from the Christmas pudding after setting the brandy alight?'

Wolke makes it clear from his standpoint as Professor Emeritus of Chemistry that most of what happens in a kitchen is chemistry. When you apply heat to anything - say an egg white - the heat causes changes in the chemical structure. And apart from satisfying our curiosity, knowing what's happening in the frying pan might just make us better cooks.

It's a book you can dip into, rather than read all the way through, as the sections are made up of many of the answers he has given in his syndicated Washington Post column to readers' questions. My favourite parts were his careful and exact debunking of common myths, for example the difference between refined white sugar and the sticky brown stuff. In a similar vein he explains that sodium chloride - common salt - is the same thing whether it came out of the sea yesterday or 10 million years ago. Sea salt and rock salt are both crystallised from sea water, which is why 'sea salt' frequently comes from the same mine as 'rock salt'.

He's pretty stern about food labelling as well. What few laws exist to protect we consumers are frequently not so much flouted as creatively complied with. As Wolke points out, no one knows more about the food they produce than the manufacturers, but for obvious reasons they don't always pass the information on clearly to their customers. With this book under your belt, you'll be able to extract more information from a label than before, although that's something of a double-edged sword.

The book is also interspersed with recipes, most of which I skipped past in my rush to find out more about fats - saturated, unsaturated, animal, vegetable, poly and mono and all combinations of these. One recipe took my fancy, poached Portuguese meringues, selected to demonstrate the chemical properties of cream of tartar. And a couple of ancient arguments are now settled. Does boiling water freeze faster than cold water, and does pasta cook faster if the water is salted before it boils?

Funny, informative and easy to read, this is book that'll be on hand in my kitchen whenever there's a kitchen problem in need of a solution. And now that I know how they de-caffeinate coffee…