What Einstein Told His Cook Read Free Page B

or “hydrated carbon.” We now know that such a simple formula isn’t true for all carbohydrates, but we’re stuck with the name.
    The chemical similarity that unites all carbohydrates is that their molecules all contain glucose, also known as blood sugar. Because of the ubiquity of carbohydrates in plants and animals, glucose is probably the most abundant biological molecule on Earth. Our metabolism breaks all carbohydrates down into glucose, a “simple sugar” (Techspeak: a monosaccharide) that circulates in the blood and provides energy to every cell in the body. Another simple sugar is fructose, found in honey and many fruits.
    When two molecules of simple sugars are bonded together, they make a “double sugar” or disaccharide. Sucrose, the sugar in your sugar bowl and in the nectar of your centerpiece’s flowers, is a disaccharide made up of glucose and fructose. Other disaccharides are maltose or malt sugar and lactose or milk sugar, a sugar found only in mammals and never in plants.
    Complex carbohydrates or polysaccharides are made up of many simple sugars, often as many as hundreds. That’s where cellulose and the starches fit in. Foods such as peas, beans, grains, and potatoes contain both starch and cellulose. The cellulose isn’t digestible by humans (termites can do it), but it’s important in our diets as fiber. Starches are our chief source of energy, because they break down gradually into hundreds of molecules of glucose. That’s why I said that loading up on carbohydrates is like filling a gas tank with fuel.
    As different as all these carbohydrates may be in terms of their molecular structures, they all provide the same amount of energy in our metabolism: about 4 calories per gram. That’s because when you come right down to it, they’re all basically glucose.
    Two pure starches that you probably have in your pantry are cornstarch and arrowroot. You don’t need to be told where cornstarch comes from, but have you ever seen an arrowroot? It’s a perennial plant grown in the West Indies, Southeast Asia, Australia, and South Africa for its fleshy underground tubers, which are almost pure starch. The tubers are grated, washed, dried, and ground. The resulting powder is used to thicken sauces, puddings, and desserts. But arrowroot does its thickening job at a lower temperature than cornstarch so it’s best for custards and puddings that contain eggs, because they can easily curdle at higher temperatures.
    A RAW DEAL
     
    In a health-food store I saw several kinds of raw sugar. How do they differ from refined sugar?
     
    N ot as much as you may be led to believe. What health-food stores call raw sugar isn’t raw in the sense that it is completely unrefined. It’s just refined to a lesser degree.
    From the dawn of history, honey was virtually the only sweetener known to humans. Sugar cane was grown in India some three thousand years ago, but it didn’t find its way to North Africa and southern Europe until around the eighth century A.D.
    Luckily for us, Christopher Columbus’s mother-in-law owned a sugar plantation (I’m not making this up) and, even before he married, he had a job ferrying sugar to Genoa from the cane fields in Madeira. All of which probably gave him the idea of taking some sugar cane to the Caribbean on his second voyage to the New World in 1493. The rest is sweet history. Today, an American eats about forty-five pounds of sugar a year, on the average. Think of it: Empty nine 5-pound bags of sugar onto the kitchen counter and behold your personal quota for the year. Of course, you didn’t get it all from the sugar bowl; sugar is an ingredient in an astounding variety of prepared foods.
    The claim is often made that brown sugars and so-called raw sugars are more healthful because they have a higher content of natural materials. It’s true that those materials include a variety of minerals—so does the perfectly natural dirt in the cane field—but they’re nothing you