Cooking for Geeks / Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food / Jeff Potter 412 p.

Dedicated to the proposition that cooking is everybody's business, this fun and informative book looks at the underlying mechanisms that make good food. If understanding that different proteins change shape at different temperature will help you put more tender meat on the table, take a look at this title. Loaded with charts and graphs (it's for geeks, right?) and interviews with some famous foodies, as well as not-so-famous food scientists, this is an amusing read in or out of the kitchen.