Bakewise. Finally.

Eleven years ago, food scientist Shirley Corriher published CookWise, one of the bibles of the modern geek kitchen and still one of the first great cookbooks to be inspired by Harold McGee's masterwork On Food and Cooking. At the time she promised a sequel, already titled even then BakeWise, about the fiddliest and most obsessively scientific of kitchen disciplines. And us Corriher fans waited... and waited... and waited...

In that time, the world lost Julia Child and Jeff Smith. Cook's Illustrated went from a small-scale fringe publication saved from the dumpster of corporate publishing to a major vector of culinary education to the masses. Alton Brown went from an obscure studio hand who had worked on a few REM videos to a god among TV chefs. Mark Bittman set out to teach us How To Cook Everything, and The Joy of Cooking came truly back to life for people who thought the 1997 edition moved too far away from Irma Rombauer's original vision. Hervé This and Ferran Adrià turned molecular gastronomy from an odd little laboratory hobby to a major source of debate and inspiration, and Tony Bourdain went from an obscure hard-luck case made good to a major international celebrity on the basis of a Hunter S. Thompson approach to food writing and a love for trying any specialty, no matter how obscure or potentially disgusting. Food blogs like Cooking for Engineers came online to help feed the masses of hungry geeks who had for years subsisted on ramen and stir-fried random.

And BakeWise languished, unshipped, until the end of October 2008 (somewhere around the 20th IIRC).

I now have it, about two weeks after seeing copies on my local bookstore's shelf. My early feelings on it are positive, and my next cookbook review (most of which I've placed on Amazon.com). This one will go there too, but I also intend to post it here, and likely submit it to the next Tangled Bank (along with another post that will either be about wheat gluten or corn genetics, to make up for my failure to write something for the last one). Watch this space.

(I will say early on that I love the layout -- it's boring and borderline hideous, and I'd like to think it was an in-joke for Shirley's computer-geek readers used to looking at documents composed in troff.)