Cooking - more than fun

Cooking is more than preparing food for eating (definition provided by Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary); cooking is a science. When I prepare food (which is quite seldom), I see more than the list of ingredients followed by a set of instructions. I look at these instructions and dissect the aspects of a dish and rationalize cooking in a scientific perspective.

Why is it necessary to knead bread dough?
Why add salt to boiling water?
Why do ice cream, frozen custards and yogurts, gelato, and similar frozen desserts not freeze into a solid chunk (like a block of ice)?
How do sugars ferment into alcohols and how do alcoholic wines become vinegar?
Why deep-fat fry, pan fry, or sauté? What are the differences and its effect on the final food product?
What are the best cooking methods of foods?
What is light/white meat and dark meat and why are they different?
Why are eggs a common “binder” in recipes?
How do variations in the proportions of ingredients affect a final product of a food? (A good example I will explain later involves Chocolate Chip Cookies)
What is baking powder versus baking soda? Can they be interchanged in a recipe, what are their effects on baked goods?
How does a refrigerator or freezer cool food?
Why do oil and water (and water-type liquids) not combine well? Why add the oil to boiling water when cooking pasta?
Can a cupcake and a cake use the same recipe?
Is corn syrup bad for one’s health? (Interesting information available about corn syrup)
What is the difference between table sugar (granulated, confectioner/powder, raw), artificial sweeteners, corn syrup (dark and light), brown sugar (dark, golden, light), honey, etc. and can these different sugar (and sugar-type substitutes) be interchanged in recopies?
How does adding (or taking away) heat change food’s “chemistry”?

And the list of these questions (based on cooking) continues, and I could provide over a hundred different cooking-related inquiries.

Easily, I can go to the streets and ask with what people he/she associates baking and cooking. I can assume there will be several who mention either girls or housewives – even the women.
Why associate cooking with women? Yet again, why associate working with the lower social class? Without going too far in depth to our racism unit (in English class), it is just human nature that we categorize.

Now,
Let me relate back to cooking as a science. How many would associate cooking and science?
Probably not too many, but cooking involves science (albeit not distinctly in many cases). Chemistry, physics, biology, anatomy, botany, ichthyology, ornithology, crystallography (studying crystals, like salts and sugars), and many, many more sciences intermixed to have a foundation for cooking. Transforming raw ingredients to form succulent dishes involved thousands of years of tradition, experimentation, tasting to meld flavors or avoid certain combinations of food. Only until recently (compared to the length of human cooking) have scientists discovered the science behind some of the cooking procedures used in modern culinary compositions.

“Science: It’s what’s for dinner.”