Cooked, By Michael Pollan (Penguin)

The magic gets all of us, in the end.
Many, many years ago I asked the great Richard Olney what it was in cooking that captivated him. “I believe in magic”, he said, simply.
And it only takes until page 4 of Michael Pollan’s new book, “Cooked”, before he, too, is smitten:
“Most of us have happy memories of watching our mothers in the kitchen, performing feats that sometimes looked very much like sorcery and typically resulted in something tasty to eat. In ancient Greece, the word for “cook”, “butcher” and “priest” was the same – mageiros – and the word shares an etymological root with “magic”. I would watch, rapt, when my mother conjured her most magical dishes...”
“Cooked” is the story of a man succumbing to the magic. Despite his intense involvement with food and food politics over the last fifteen years, Pollan admits that he wasn’t a great kitchen guy.
But what he learnt when spending the necessary kitchen time mastering the disciplines he explores – barbecue; braising; baking and fermenting – was that “Above all else, what I found in the kitchen is that cooking connects”.
In true Pollan style, he embraces the disciplines with gusto – he mans the grill, bakes the bread, salts the kimchi, and stirs the paddle to make the raw milk cheese. Along the way, he diverts into every conceivable intellectual detour, so “Cooked” is an exhilarating read, even though certain parts are surprising – he had never, ever cooked pork loin in milk?! he hasn’t read the extraordinary essay on chopping an onion that opens Robert Farrar Capon’s “The Supper of the Lamb”?! his research into braising never leads him to look at the Irish bronze age fulachta fiadh?!
This is nit-picking, of course, because Pollan has read everything else, and it is his seamless integration of all he has learnt both practically and intellectually that makes “Cooked” a book to equal his masterful “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”.
As befits a man smitten with the magic, the book ends with an epiphany. All of you who cook, you will know just exactly what it is.