Rather than teaching you recipes, Ratio teaches you the basis of how food is made. It teaches you the proportions of commonly made items like bread and cookies, and from there you can modify the recipes to produce what you want. Probably the most important cook book on my shelf. ( )

Meh. Looked a lot more promising than it really was. ( )

I skimmed through this one, and it is very interesting. I can see how it would be helpful to know these ratios, and I'm sure chefs need to know them. I'm really bad at memorizing, though, so I just want someone to tell me how many cups of stuff to mix together. ( )

Great book. I learned a lot and am comfortable now being able to improvise on these basic ratios. One annoying thing of you are reading it cover to cover, is that some of the content from the introduction to each chapter is repeated in the recipes. ( )

These days there seems to me to be too much art in cookbooks and not enough craft. Is that recipe really going to work? What if I modified it?

Here we have a useful complement to Harold McGee on the science of cooking. This book is a practical guide to the concept of the ratios of basic ingredients one to another. Understanding the basic principles will preserve a cook from disaster, whether in critically appraising or varying a recipe.

Recipes are included, but it has to be said that measurements are not consistent. One minute it's American (butter in sticks), another it's metric (not very often), and sometimes it's uncertain (are the ounces American or Imperial?). But really, the point of it is not recipes, it's enlightenment. ( )