On Food and Cooking (Harold McGee)

I was looking forward to reading this famous book about the science of food. It fulfilled all my expectations and more - much more - too much more, in fact. I got so bogged down in all the details of the chemistry, history, linguistics, and so on that I found it tough going. Maybe I'm not as much of a science geek as I'd like to think, but I was looking more for practical cooking techniques with their scientific foundations, and less for the full college-level scientific analysis of every fiber and component. I wound up abandoning it early.