You don’t need to know the exact science of what makes a great grilled cheese sandwich to be able to enjoy it. (It has to do with the milk’s net negative charge in cheesemaking and flowing protein molecules.)

But knowing some of the how and why behind cooking appeals to the geek in us and can inform our cooking.

In “The Kitchen as Laboratory: Reflections on the Science of Food and Cooking” (Columbia), editors Cesar Vega, Job Ubbink and Erik van der Linden observe that science in the form of new techniques and ingredients is increasingly invading the kitchen.

For a proper understanding of those techniques, the essays (written with a gee-isn’t-this-cool attitude) aim to take a step back, explaining why food behaves the way it does during preparation.

Here are three fun things we learned:

• Why doesn’t the ice cream in a baked Alaska melt in the oven? It’s all about heat transference: Both the meringue coating the outside and the cake base are inefficient conductors of heat. Together, they insulate enough that the ice cream melts only slightly (just 6 percent!), despite the high temperature.

• Adding a little baking soda will brown onions faster. The baking soda, a weak base, makes the onions less acidic, which speeds up the browning, called the Maillard reaction. Just use a pinch, though. Too much and the onions become wet and mushy. Other ways to speed browning: adding protein or sugars (an egg wash or sugar water on baked goods), increasing temperature, using less water.

• Why does lemon juice prevent browning? Chopping a vegetable or fruit sets up a protective reaction. Enzymes combine with phenolic compounds to produce an “antimicrobial defense line” to protect damaged cell walls, resulting in browning. To stop that, you have to render the enzymes inactive. Lemon juice and other acids, such as vinegar do that, as do heat (blanching) and salt (brining).