Titlehere.(On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen: Completely Revised and Updated)(Book Review)

Byline: Jeffrey Steingarten

Yesterday, as we lit into the last of the summer's tomatoes-deep crimson, their thin skins barely able to hold their juices, tasting as sweet as Twinkies, as tart as fresh lemonade, and with a more intense tomato flavor than anything in memory-I whispered, "TGFM."

"Don't whisper with your mouth full," my wife began, until the pleasures of a stupendously ripe tomato cut her short.

All over America, serious cooks have often been heard to utter "TGFM," or its equivalent, "Thank God for McGee"-that is, Harold McGee, America's leading light on the science of food. His first book, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, published 20 years ago, soon became a classic, and it changed the way we cooks think about and do things in the kitchen. Now McGee's classic has a sequel, about to be published under the same title, plus the words "Completely Revised and Updated." But it's really a different book. McGee spent ten years writing it, and it reflects much of what scientists and cooks have learned over the past 20 years. It's also where I finally found an answer to my desperate question: "Is it truly awful, as some people claim, to refrigerate a tomato?"

Yes, it is awful. The enzymes that bring flavor to a ripening tomato are paralyzed by cold. If the tomato was green when refrigerated, you can forget about it. It will never be other than mealy and tasteless. If it was quite ripe, you can reverse part of the damage by bringing it back to room temperature for a day or two. And so it was just in the nick of time that the ...