Attractively designed and extensively illustrated with color photographs, line drawings, charts, and sidebars, this contemporary introduction to cooking and food preparation focuses on information that is relevant to today's aspiring chef. Comprehensive and well-written, it emphasizes an understanding of cooking fundamentals, explores the preparation of fresh ingredients, and provides information on other relevant topics, such as food history and food science. This introduction to cooking outlines professionalism, food safety and sanitation, nutrition, recipes and menus, tools and equipment, knife skills, kitchen staples, dairy products, principles of meat, fish and vegetable cookery, garde manger, baking, and presentation. Exciting, new features to this updated edition include: Healthy Cooking chapter (Chapter 23) combines materials on basic nutrition (Chapter 3 in On Cooking, 4th edition), healthy cooking techniques and cooking for special diets such as vegetarian diets or allergic diets. Over 250 new photographs emphasize procedural aspects of cooking. Virtually all recipes are now illustrated with photographs. Updated concept changes to meet the Food Code revision (Chapter 20) Fresh design, including over 300 new photographs and line drawings Content updates to reflect current trends in the Culinary Arts This book is an excellent reference for Chefs, Restaurant Managers and others in the food service industry.