lm. Dairy Journal 7 (1997) 487 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain 09%6946/97/%17.00 +O.OO ELSEVIER
Book Review Food Proteins and their Applications. Edited by S. Damodaran and A. Paraf. Marcel Dekker Inc, New York, 1997. 681 pp. ISBN: 0-8247-9820-l. Price: US$195.
Kitabatake) and muscle proteins (Xiang). Chapters 1322 are grouped under a section heading “Processing technology to improve functionality of proteins in food systems”. It includes a rather heterogeneous group of topics: Enzyme and chemical modification of proteins (Schwenke); Genetic engineering of proteins (Batt); Functionality of protein hydrolyzates (Nielsen); Highpressure effects on proteins (Heremans, van Camp and Huyghebaert); Protein and protein-polysaccharide microparticles (Sanchez and Paquin); Edible protein films and coatings (Krochta); Effects of processing and storage on the nutritional value of food proteins (Finot); Extraction of food proteins (Maubois and Ollivier); Chemical and physical methods for the characterization of food proteins (Nandi); Applications of immunochemistry for protein structure control (Paraf and Boquien). Again, many of this set of chapters rely heavily on milk proteins for examples. All the chapters are well written and extensively illustrated with tables and figures. The book is well edited to give quite a consistent style. Overall, this is a very useful book which I am pleased to recommend very highly. It is perhaps a little expensive for part of the target readership, i.e. graduate students, but it should be included in Departmental and Institutional libraries.
According to the editors, “the goal of this book is to provide up-to-date information on this important area of food research”. In the view of this reviewer, this objective has been achieved rather well. Again according to the editors, the book is intended primarily as a textbook for graduate students and as a reference book for food scientists in academia and industry-I believe that it is at an appropriate level for this readership. The book is divided into 22 chapters, written by recognised experts on the particular topic and extensively referenced. Chapters l-6 describe fundamental physicochemical aspects of protein structure (Damodaran), protein denaturation (Boye, Ma and Harwalkar), protein-stabilized foams and emulsions (Damodaran), protein gels (Oakenfull, Pearce and Burley), protein-lipid and protein-flavour interactions (Chobert and Haertle) and proteincarbohydrate interactions (Tolstoguzov). Many of these chapters rely heavily on studies on milk proteins for examples of protein functionality. Chapters 7-12 describe the structure-function relationship of the principal food protein groups: caseins (Dalgleish), whey proteins (Cayot and Lorient), soy proteins (Utsumi, Matsumura and Mori), wheat proteins (MacRitchie and Lafiandra), egg proteins (Doi and
P. F. Fox Department
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of Food Chemistry, University College, Cork, Ireland