Preface — An Invitation to the Reader

Preface — An Invitation to the Reader

Every naturalist begins in the same posture: bent low over some small and ordinary thing, determined to see it properly for the first time. Charles Darwin spent eight years upon barnacles before he trusted himself to speak of finches. The compiler of the present volume — a naturalist of a hungrier and less patient sort — has spent rather longer bent over the dinner table, and reports that the ordinary thing found there is not ordinary at all. A spoonful of soup, taken without a thought between one sentence of conversation and the next, is among the most intricate events the human body performs: a co-ordinated dispatch of nerves, receptors, memories and expectations, arriving within a second or two at a single, fleeting verdict we call, far too casually, taste.

That word deserves arrest before we go a sentence further, for it stands accused of a great imprecision, and the case against it is strong. What the tongue alone can report is in truth rather meagre: five qualities, and five only — sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and that rich, savoury fullness the Japanese first gave a name to, umami — each detected by a receptor built, in effect, like a lock admitting only certain shapes of key. Everything else we credit to "taste" — the raspberry-ness of a raspberry, the toastiness of toast, the particular melancholy of a bruised apple — arrives by other doors entirely. It arrives chiefly by the nose: not only the front door of the nostrils, but a secret back stair that climbs from the throat while we chew, supplying the better part of what we call flavour, as anyone who has ever pinched their nose through a slice of raw onion can attest with watering eyes. It arrives by touch, which reports the crackle of a crust and the yield of a ripe plum. It arrives by a stranger sense still, without a polite Sunday name of its own, that registers the burn of the chilli and the cool of the mint as something between touch and pain — the chemesthetic sense, of which more in its proper chapter. And it arrives, not least and perhaps most of all, by the mind, which tints every mouthful with memory, expectation, and the company one keeps at table. Flavour, in short, is not a single sense but a confederation of them: a parliament that convenes anew with every bite and adjourns again before we have thought to learn its members' names. It is the whole business of this volume to call that parliament to order, one member at a time, and take its evidence properly.

This is the first of seven volumes projected under the general title After Taste, and there is a certain rightness in beginning here, at the mouth, before cookery has laid so much as a finger upon the ingredient. The series to come will travel forward through history as it travels forward through the kitchen — its paper, its type, its very manner of illustration ageing decade by decade, volume by volume, until by the seventh it arrives, blinking, in a kitchen not yet built. That is a pleasure reserved for later shelves. This volume concerns itself only with first things: the raw apparatus of flavour, the instrument before the music is played upon it.

A word, too, on the method of this compendium, and how the reader ought to hold it. It is not a textbook, though the reader will find none of the small falsehoods textbooks sometimes repeat from mere habit — in the very next chapter a popular myth about the tongue meets its overdue and thorough burial, a myth that has survived a century in classrooms on the strength of a bad graph and a worse memory. Nor is it a cookery book, though the working cook will find, scattered through these chapters, a compass by which to season with confidence rather than superstition. It is, rather, a field guide, arranged in the order the body itself consults its own senses: beginning at the instrument of taste in the mouth, travelling out to the nose, into the crucible of the pan where a Frenchman named Maillard performs his slow alchemy, across the four compass points of seasoning, toward the fifth taste and the frontiers beyond it, into the textures and small delicious perils of the mouth, up into the mind that colours everything it touches, and arriving at last at the composed plate, where every element examined separately in these pages sits down together at table. Each chapter may be read alone, as a naturalist reads a single entry in a field journal; read in sequence, they build a single quiet argument — that eating well is not a mystery to be left to instinct or inheritance, but a set of mechanisms that reward a little understanding, and repay it handsomely in pleasure.

Scattered through these chapters, too, the reader will meet boxed asides headed Field Note — a habit borrowed directly from the naturalist's satchel. A field naturalist does not describe the forest only in general terms; she kneels, and studies one beetle, one leaf, one feather, in what might seem excessive detail, trusting that the particular will illuminate the general far better than any survey could manage alone. So too here: wherever a chapter's argument threatens to grow abstract, a Field Note will anchor it to one small, specific, and thoroughly real specimen — a taste bud, a vanilla pod, a crystal of salt — pinned to the page like a moth to a collector's board, and examined under the glass.

If this volume claims a patron saint, it is Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the French magistrate and gastronome who in 1825 published his own Physiologie du Goût and thereby invented, more or less single-handedly, the notion that the pleasures of the table might be examined with the same rigour, and the same delight, as the pleasures of the mind. "Animals fill themselves; man eats," he wrote. "The man of mind alone knows how to eat." It is a proud claim, and a faintly wicked one, but it holds a truth this volume means to earn rather than merely assert: that understanding why a thing is delicious does not diminish the pleasure of it, and very often deepens that pleasure considerably. Brillat-Savarin observed elsewhere, with the settled confidence of a man who had thought hard about his dinner, that the pleasures of the table "belong to all ages, to all conditions, to all countries, and to all eras." They alone, of all the pleasures available to us, he believed, never entirely desert us. This compendium is written in that same spirit: curious rather than reverent, rigorous rather than solemn, and always, at bottom, hungry.

So let us begin, as any expedition must, with the instrument nearest to hand. Put out your tongue, Reader — not rudely, but with the frank curiosity of a naturalist meeting a promising new specimen — and consider what exactly it is you are examining. The chapters that follow will tell you a great deal you did not expect. But the first discovery you may make yourself, this instant, without so much as turning the page: that so humble and so constant a companion as your own tongue has, in all likelihood, never once been properly introduced to you. Let us remedy that now.