The Missing Ingredient

The Curious Role of Time in Food and Flavor

By: Jenny Linford

Narrated by: Karen Cass

From hours in the oven to years in the barrel, this illuminating book examines the relationship between the cook and the clock, and the underappreciated impact that time has on our favorite dishes

Two minutes into boiling an egg, the white isn’t set and the yolk is totally raw. After five minutes however, the white is fully set and the yolk slightly runny - a perfectly spoonable, soft-boiled egg. Boil for another three minutes for a set and tender yolk, or an additional five minutes for a fully set yolk. But be careful: once you boil the egg past ten minutes, you’ll have a crumbly yolk and dry, overly firm white. When it comes to boiled eggs, you may think you’re only dealing with one ingredient, but there is another less obvious, but still critical ingredient involved that should not be overlooked: time.

The Missing Ingredient is the first book to consider the intrinsic yet often forgotten role of time in creating the flavors and textures we love. Through a series of encounters with ingredients, producers, cooks, artisans, and chefs, acclaimed author of The Chef’s Library Jenny Linford shows how, time and again, time itself is the invisible ingredient in our most cherished recipes. Playfully structured through different periods of time, the book examines the fast and slow, from the seconds it takes for sugar to caramelize to the centuries it takes for food heritage to be passed down from our ancestors. From the brevity of blanching and the days required in the crucial process of fermentation, to the months of slow ripening that make a great cheddar and the years needed for certain wines to reach their peak, Linford dissects each segment of time needed to cook - and enjoy - simple and intricate cuisine alike. Including vignettes from the immediacy of taste (seconds), the exactitude of pasta (minutes), and smoking and barbecuing meats (hours), to maturing cheese (weeks), infusing vanilla extract (months), and perfecting parmigiana and port (years), The Missing Ingredient is an enlightening and essential volume for foodies, bakers, home cooks, chefs, and anyone who appreciates a perfectly-executed dish.

©2018 Jenny Linford (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Falling too heavily on tautology

A book about time, you can imagine, a factor that's about as obvious as saying "you need hands to hold a knife," can quickly fall on tautology and obviousness. The only way to avoid that, however, is through careful introspection and revealing exciting new insights into how it can be utilized, or how it reveals something most cooks overlook. This book misses the mark. Linford spends most of the introduction flailing around tautologies, exclaiming clear biases, which can be summarised as "everything new and time-saving is bad and everything old and demanding on time is good." Clearly, there are cases where this is so. Aged balsamic is better, in many cases, than not-aged balsamic, as is Whiskey, parma ham, and even good steaks. But the biases are often tripped into contradiction. For example, for all Linford's claims of common foods now being called "homemade" when it was previously just "cooking," she also claimed that her favourite salted caramel (simply sugar and salt - and extremely easy to make) is made by a company. She attempts to gloss over that contradiction by selling the story that it's difficult and dangerous to do. It's really not. Not at all. But maybe it is on a commercial level (shrug emoji). She also takes the common bias against MSG, seeing it as an additive and wrapping it up in some justification of it being added over other time-consuming ingredients, which is just bizzare and a clear bias driven through ignorance. There are many more. It ends up in a rollercoaster of eye-rolls!

Unfortunately, this type of book is all too common now: writers that are not expert chefs, not food scientists
(nor even scientifically minded) and not particularly an expert in any sub-field of food writing books about the science of food and cooking, mostly through interviews with other experts that they lack the knowledge to vet or understand the veracity of the claims. You end up with empty tautologies, recycled garbage, and fluff. Lots of fluff. This is going immediately on the "refund" pile for me.

I liked the narrator though. I think she did a great job and she was very easy to listen to.