On food and cooking the science and lore of the kitchen ( PDFDrive ) 19

and concrete, and have particular structures that determine how they — and the foods made out of them — behave in the kitchen The better we can visualize what they’re like and what happens to them, the easier it is to understand what happens in cooking And in cooking it’s generally a molecule’s overall shape that matters, not the precise placement of each atom In most of the drawings of molecules in this book, only the overall shapes are shown, and they’re represented in different ways — as long thin lines, long thick lines, honeycomb-like rings with some atoms indicated by letters — depending on what behavior needs to be explained Many food molecules are built from a backbone of interconnected carbon atoms, with a few other kinds of atoms (mainly hydrogen and oxygen) projecting from the backbone The carbon backbone is what creates the overall structure, so often it is drawn with no indications of the atoms themselves, just lines that show the bonds between atoms  ...themselves, just lines that show the bonds between atoms