Cookbook review: Keys to Good Cooking by Harold McGee

You'll remember Harold McGee from On Food and Cooking, the magnum opus of food science and kitchen lore. It's hefty, but indispensable.

His new book, Keys to Good Cooking, is essentially a big pretty book of kitchen tips. How to achieve the perfect hard-boiled egg, how to select fresh watermelon, how to sear steak, that sort of thing. It's fascinating stuff, but the book lives in that weird neverland of not-quite-a-reference-book, not-really-a-book-you-want-to-read-from-cover-to-cover. It's the sort of book you want to dip into periodically; it'll be difficult to absorb all that information otherwise. Like I said, fascinating stuff, but there's a lot.

I haven't decided whether I want my own copy of this or not (I got it from the library; I audition a lot of my cookbooks that way). I think I'd like it better if it were a Twitter feed I could subscribe to; a new kitchen tip every day!

(Speaking of Twitter feeds, you follow mine, right?)