Flavorama

Johnson, a flavor chemist who has worked at Noma's research lab, builds the book around a genuinely useful premise: flavor isn't one sense but an assembled experience combining taste, smell, texture, and even sound, and she walks through the actual chemistry, volatile aromatics, the Maillard reaction, how fat and acid physically interact with receptors, behind why dishes work. What distinguishes it from adjacent food-science books is the working-cook's angle: the science is consistently in service of kitchen decisions rather than presented as trivia.