Modernist Cuisine - Great cookbook, or greatest cookbook?

[McCaber]

A 6-volume, full-color set of books, out to inject as much science into the art of cooking humanly possible. Refining dishes to their platonic ideals, getting the most out of your food, or at least the promo text says so.

I don't know about you, but I'm excited about this. It's the way I like to cook, codified and pretty enough to fit on a coffee table. If only it had a smaller pricetag...

http://modernistcuisine.com
And the blog is fun to read, too.

[Nath]

I haven't seen the book, but I attended a talk by Myhrvold and Young a few months ago. Cool stuff. They had some samples, too.

[nitePhyyre]

Considering it is still in pre-order phase, I'm going to have to go with c) None of the Above

[Azrael]

At more than $100 a piece for each of the 6 volumes, I seriously doubt that it's ever going to achieve wide enough success to be considered great. Perhaps the most comprehensive? To be any good as a cookbook at all, you have to be able to use it. It's not a literary work.

Churchill's 6 volume history of WWII can be considered not only comprehensive, but also 'great', and maybe even 'the greatest'. But it's $75 new and probably a small fraction of that used. Even at the time of publication it was still reasonably priced.