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Harold McGee

With extensive experience in food chemistry as well as cooking and physics, his role in the book is to convey to readers not only the important foods and their properties but to answer basic cooking questions with facts, diagrams and examples.

Louis Pasteur

Originally developed to lengthen the shelf life of alcohol, this character's invention led to the pathogen-killing heat treatment that allows milk and several other products to be enjoyed by those who do not live on a farm.

Nicolas Appert

He discovered that if he sealed food in a glass container and then heated the container in boiling water, the food would keep without spoiling.

Justus von Liebig

This character came up the idea of searing meat to seal in juices around 1850. Although the reasoning for the method was later disproved, his idea spread like wildfire after the publication of his book.

Andreas Marggraf

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