Chapter 7 — After Taste

"It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others." — M.F.K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me (1943)

E very chapter of this compendium until this one has been, in the end, an instruction — a way to do something, or a reason to want to. This one instructs in nothing. It is the plate carried out after the meal is over, when the cooking is done and the guests have gone and there is nothing left to make; and its only business is to say, before the light goes out in the kitchen, what all the making was for. Seven volumes are a long time to spend in a single room, and a reader who has come this far is owed an answer plainer than any recipe — not how to cook, which the preceding pages have laboured to teach, but why it was ever worth the trouble. Why a creature that could feed itself, as every other animal does, on whatever is nearest and raw, chose instead to carry the food home, and light a fire, and wait, and season, and set a second place at the table. The answer is the last thing this book has to give, and it turns out to be the first thing it ever knew.

The chapter before this one left off on a promise that the fundamentals do not move — that beneath every new mould and clever machine, cooking still runs on heat, salt, time and care, and always will. That is true, and it is the ground this whole volume has stood on. But there was a small dishonesty of emphasis in the way it was put, and the end of the book is the place to correct it, because those four were never equal partners. Heat, salt and time are techniques; they can be measured, taught, and got wrong. The fourth is not a technique at all. Care is the thing the other three are for — the reason anyone troubles to govern a flame or wait out a ferment rather than simply eating to stop being hungry. Take the care out, and what remains is only chemistry performed upon food, which is to say fuel. Leave it in, and the very same acts become something a person does for someone, even when the someone is only oneself at the close of a hard day. Six volumes have been, without once quite saying so, an extended argument that this fourth ingredient is the real subject of the kitchen, and that the other three were only ever the grammar it needed to make itself understood.

This is not a modern sentimentality, whatever the age of the word for it. Two centuries ago a French lawyer named Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin — a man who had lost everything to the Revolution and clawed it back, and who paid his way through three years of exile teaching French and playing first violin in a New York theatre pit — sat down at the very end of his life to write not another book of law but a book about eating, and in doing so all but invented the idea that the table is a fit subject for a serious mind. His Physiology of Taste, published in December 1825, two months before he died, argued against the whole weight of respectable opinion that a person might be learned and delighted at the same time; that gastronomy was a form of knowledge and not merely of greed; and, in his most cheerful provocation, that the discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of humankind than the discovery of a star. This compendium has been, in the plainest terms, a seven-volume vindication of that one impertinent claim — a long argument that the man was right, and that the attention we are trained from childhood to think of as beneath us is in fact very near the top of what a life is for.

What the Seven Volumes Were For

Look back now along the shelf, and see how patiently the point has been hiding in plain sight. Volume I, The Secrets of Flavour, set out to explain what taste actually is — the five tastes on the tongue, the aromas that do most of the work the nose gets no credit for, and the browning that turns a pale surface savoury and deep. There is a whole century of chemistry folded into that first book, and it is worth remembering how recently much of it arrived. The fifth taste had no name in any European language until 1908, when Kikunae Ikeda, puzzling over why a simple kelp broth tasted of a savoury fullness that neither sugar nor salt could account for, boiled down some twelve kilograms of kombu to thirty-odd grams of glutamate crystals and gave the sensation a word — umami — that the West would take most of the following century to accept. The brown crust on a good roast is younger still as a piece of knowledge: it is the Maillard reaction, named for the French physician-chemist Louis-Camille Maillard, who first described that marriage of sugars and amino acids in 1912. Yet every page of the science was, beneath the chemistry, a training of the attention — an argument that the cook who knows what is happening on the tongue tastes more than the cook who does not, and that flavour is at least half a matter of knowing what to notice.

Volume II, The Science of Nourishment, turned from the tongue to the body, and followed what becomes of a meal after the pleasure of it is spent — the digestion, the nutrients, the long quiet chemistry of being kept alive by what we eat; and its lesson too was a form of care, the recognition that to feed a person is to take part in the most intimate maintenance of their life. Virginia Woolf, totting up the difference a good dinner makes to the mind that has eaten it, put the whole of that volume into a single sentence in 1929: "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well." The body kept in decent repair is the ground on which every finer thing a person hopes to do must stand, and the cook is the one who tends that ground three times a day. Volume III, Fire, Ferment and Transformation, took up the two great powers by which raw stuff is made into food — the fast violence of heat and the slow patience of the microbe — and showed that cooking is, at bottom, the management of transformation across time. The microbe half of that story is the humbler and the older: humankind leavened bread and soured milk and fermented wine for thousands of years before it had the first idea what was doing the work, and it was not until Pasteur, in the 1850s and 60s, caught the living yeasts and bacteria in the act that anyone could say fermentation is not decay at all but the honest industry of things too small to see. To cook by either power is only attention held steady while something changes.

Volume IV, The World's Great Tables, left home and went round the earth, and found that every people alive has built, out of the same short list of problems, a different and complete and beloved answer — that there is no one right way to set a table, only a thousand right ways, each of them somebody's grandmother's kitchen. Beneath the thousand answers ran a single grammar, the one Wendell Berry named when he began an essay with the flat proposition that "eating is an agricultural act": every cuisine on earth is a standing treaty between a people and a particular patch of ground, a way of turning what one stretch of the world happens to grow into something worth gathering for. Volume V, The Glutton Club, followed curiosity to the far edge of the plate, past the point where most appetites turn back, and learned there the discipline that keeps curiosity honest — the same spirit that had sent Darwin's fork halfway through a lesser rhea before he realised he was eating a bird new to science, and sent Alfred Russel Wallace across the world to pronounce the reeking, custard-fleshed durian "a new sensation worth a voyage to the East to experience." Wonder, that volume argued, is only worth having if it is paid for with respect, and the open mouth must never outrun the open eyes. And Volume VI, In Praise of Garlic, narrowed the whole wide world to a single bulb, and proved the compendium's oldest claim in miniature — that anything at all, looked at closely enough and loved hard enough, will open into everything. Even the bite of the thing turned out to be a story: the pungency a cook prizes does not exist in an unbruised clove at all but is manufactured on the instant of damage, when crushing lets an enzyme meet the odourless compound alliin and lash it into the hot, volatile allicin that is the plant's chemical alarm against being eaten — so that every cook mincing garlic is quietly disarming a small chemical weapon and setting it on the table as a welcome. Six books, six questions; and running under all of them, like a stock simmering out of sight at the back of the stove, one unspoken subject the whole time.

This seventh volume, The Complete Kitchen, has done the only thing left to do with all of that. It has stopped explaining and started cooking — gathered the six books' worth of why into a single working room, set out the small batterie that actually matters and the mother techniques that unlock a thousand dishes, learned to compose a meal and keep a conscientious kitchen and bring the world's methods home, and looked honestly at the kitchen not yet built — and then handed the reader, who began as a student of flavour and has become, over these thousands of pages, something much closer to a cook, the apron, the knife, and the fire. Six volumes asked what food is. The seventh asked what to make of it. And the shelf they form together, seven spines standing in a row, tells one story that none of them could tell alone: that to pay this much attention to a thing as ordinary as dinner is not a distraction from a serious life but very near the centre of one.

The Oldest Technology of Care

Consider what an odd thing a shared meal is, and how old. Long before writing, before the wheel, before metal or the city, human beings were doing something no other animal does: carrying food back instead of eating it where it fell, bringing it to a common fire, dividing it among those who had not caught it — the young, the old, the sick, the ones who had failed that day — and eating it together, in one place, at one time, on purpose. Anthropologists have a cool word for it, commensality, the practice of sharing a table, and they treat it as one of the founding technologies of our kind, as consequential as the hand-axe and a great deal older than agriculture. It is worth pausing on that word, technology, because it is exactly right and not a flourish. A technology is a tool for solving a problem, and the shared meal solves the hardest problem a social animal faces, which is how to bind a crowd of separately hungry, separately mortal creatures into something that will look after its own. The fire that cooked the food and the circle that shared it did more to make us human than any blade. We are, to a degree we seldom notice, the animal that cooks and the animal that shares its dinner, and those turn out to be very nearly the same fact.

That claim sounds like sentiment, and it is not; it may be close to literal biology. The primatologist Richard Wrangham has spent a career arguing, in Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, that the mastery of the flame was not a late convenience but the thing that built the species — that once our ancestors began to cook, the food they ate became so much easier to chew and to digest that it released a flood of calories no raw diet could supply, and that in the slow arithmetic of evolution those spare calories were spent on the most expensive organ a body can run. As the cooked diet fed the growing brain, the gut that had ground away at raw fibre could afford to shrink, and the jaw and the great chewing teeth grew smaller with it; the fire did the first stage of digestion outside the body, and the body reorganised itself around the gift. Whether every detail of the theory holds, its shape is hard to argue with, and its meaning for this book is plain: the same hearth that first cooked the meal was the one the group gathered around to eat it. Cooking and sharing were not two habits our ancestors happened to pick up. They may between them be the very things that made the creature capable of habits at all — the fire that grew the brain and the circle that gave it someone to think about.

None of this need be taken on the anthropologist's word alone, because a good deal of it is written in the ground. The shared hearth is not only a figure of speech; it is a layer of ash that can be dug through and dated. At Qesem Cave, on the coastal plain of what is now Israel, excavators have uncovered a single broad fireplace — some four square metres of it — built and rebuilt in exactly the same spot around three hundred thousand years ago, its stacked layers of ash ringed by the places where the animals were butchered: the oldest known trace of a people coming back, again and again, to one fire to cook and to eat together. The mastery of the flame reaches back further still — to the burned olive-wood and wild barley and grape of Gesher Benot Ya'aqov some seven hundred and ninety thousand years ago, and perhaps to the scorched bone of Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa near a million. Wherever the dates finally settle, the shape of the finding does not change, and it is the plain floor beneath everything this compendium has tried to say: for as far back as we can make out our own kind at all, we find them at a fire — and the fire already at the centre of them.

Everything this book has taught sits inside that older thing like a nut inside its shell. The knife-work and the heat control, the emulsions and the ferments, the balanced plate and the borrowed wok — every technique in these seven volumes is, finally, in the service of an act of care performed for someone, and it is this, and not any chemistry, that raises cooking at its best nearly to the condition of love. It is why food is the surest key we have to memory. A single mouthful can throw open a door forty years shut, the way Proust's narrator was ambushed by a spoonful of lime-flower tea and a crumb of madeleine and found his whole lost childhood standing in the cup. That ambush is not merely a novelist's fancy but a quirk of the wiring in the skull. Every other sense — sight, sound, touch — reports first to the thalamus, the brain's orderly relay station, before its news is passed along; smell alone skips the queue, running from the nose straight into the amygdala and the hippocampus, the seats of feeling and of memory, with nothing in between. And because most of what we call the taste of a dish is really its aroma, breathed up the back of the throat as we chew, a mouthful travels that same short and private road — which is why a flavour first met in childhood can spring open a room in the memory that no photograph and no effort of will could reach. We do not remember meals because they were nutritious; we remember them because someone made them for us, and the taste kept the love in a form that outlasted the words. To cook for people, then, is to lay down memory on their behalf — to hand them, along with their dinner, something they will still possess long after, when the cook is no longer there to give it. So central to us is this handing-on that some of the very first writing our species ever produced was recipes: among the oldest readable documents anywhere in the world are three clay tablets in the Yale Babylonian Collection, inscribed in Akkadian around 1750 BCE, in the age of Hammurabi, that set down the method for two dozen and more Mesopotamian stews — proof that almost as soon as human beings could record anything at all, one of the first things they judged worth preserving was how to make a good dinner for one another.

And there is a generosity built into the very grammar of the kitchen that runs deeper than good manners. It is one of the very few moral laws that nearly every human society seems to have arrived at on its own, without conferring. The ancient Greeks made the feeding of a stranger sacred, called it xenia — guest-friendship — and set Zeus himself to guard the bond; the same unwritten rule, feed the guest first and ask his business afterwards, turns up in one dress or another from the Bedouin tent to the Highland croft, wherever people have kept a door with a fire behind it. And every threshold a human life crosses is marked by a shared meal: we eat to name a child and to marry, to bury the dead and to seal a peace, to bring in a harvest and to forgive a wrong. No other single act carries so much of the freight of being human. Almost nothing a cook does is done for the cook alone. The one who tends the pot eats last and least; the pleasure of feeding is taken at one remove, in the face across the table rather than the plate in front of you. M.F.K. Fisher, whose words open this last chapter, wrote in that same short foreword the truest defence of the whole enterprise anyone has managed: that "there is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk," and that this — not the nourishment, which is only the pretext — was why she wrote all her life about hunger and never about wars or love, because in the sharing of food she had found the others hiding. A person cooking a meal for others is enacting, in miniature and without noticing, the oldest rule our species ever set itself — take trouble, over time, so that someone else may be nourished and glad — and the small daily heroism of ordinary family cooking, repeated three times a day for a lifetime and almost never thanked, is one of the quietly load-bearing beams of the whole human project. Here, at the last, the naturalist will say the thing the science cannot quite reach, because it is the truest thing in the book: that this taking of trouble is not a burden but very nearly the point; that there is a specific and un-counterfeitable joy in setting good food before people you love and watching them eat it; and that a life with a great deal of that joy in it is, by any measure worth trusting, a rich one. Joy is not the reward for the work. For anyone who has learned to notice, joy is what the work is made of.

Now, Go and Cook

If this compendium has a single gift to press into the reader's hands as they go, it is not any of the facts in it. Facts are cheap now, and getting cheaper; there is not a technique in these seven volumes that cannot be looked up in a moment by anyone with a question and a thumb. The gift is the other thing, the thing that cannot be looked up because it is not information but a habit of mind: a way of paying attention, at the stove and at the table, that turns eating into knowing and cooking into a kind of love. The whole apparatus of science and history and travel that these books have carried was only ever scaffolding for that — a way of teaching the reader to notice. To notice the moment the onions turn from raw to sweet, the exact grey second before garlic tips into bitterness, the way a sauce thickens all at once near the end, the difference a single flake of salt makes to a ripe tomato, the face of the person eating. Cooking rewards attention more honestly, and more immediately, than almost anything else a person can do with their hands; and the reader who has learned to give it that attention has been given, along the way and half by accident, a rehearsal for giving it to everything else that matters.

So the naturalist, who has talked for seven volumes, will now do the one useful thing left, which is to stop — because the rest of this cannot be read, only cooked. There is a kitchen near you; perhaps you are standing in it. In it there is a pan, and some salt, and something in the cold that could become dinner, and, with any luck, a person or two who would be glad to be fed. That is the whole inheritance of this book, and it was always yours; the compendium only came to point at it. Warm the pan. Salt the water. Give the food your attention and give it a little time, which are the only two gifts anything ever really needs — dinner and people both. The naturalist is going now, back to a stove of his own, where a pot wants watching. Go to yours. Cook something for someone. That, after everything — after the flavour and the nourishment, the fire and the world's tables, the daring and the garlic, the batterie and the mother techniques and the kitchen not yet built — is the whole of what these seven volumes have been trying, with all their learning, to say.

Field Note — Bread and Butter

Of all the ten thousand things a person might cook, hold up the plainest: a piece of bread, with butter on it. There is almost nothing there. Flour, which is a grass seed ground to powder; water; a pinch of salt; a little leaven, wild or tamed, to make it rise; and heat to set it — and then, on the cut slice, a knife-swipe of butter, which is only cream agitated until it changes its mind. It is the first food we give to children and very nearly the last we can still manage when we are old and ill; it is the food of the poorest table and, done well, a pleasure the richest cannot improve upon. And yet look what is folded into a single slice. Every one of the four fundamentals this book keeps returning to is present at once — the heat that browns the crust, the salt without which the loaf tastes of nothing, the time that let the dough ferment and rise, and the care of the hands that shaped it — so that a piece of bread and butter is not the humblest thing in the kitchen at all, but the whole compendium in miniature, the entire argument of seven volumes proved on a plate small enough for a child to hold.

It is also very nearly the oldest thing we know how to make. For a long time it was assumed that bread waited on farming — that someone first had to sow and reap a field of wheat before there could be a loaf. Then, in 2018, archaeologists sifting the hearths of a hunter-gatherer camp called Shubayqa 1, out in the black basalt desert of north-eastern Jordan, found the charred crumbs of a flatbread baked some fourteen thousand four hundred years ago, four millennia before anyone in that country planted a seed. People who owned no fields, who lived by the hunt and the forage, had ground wild grains and roots and baked them on hot stones for the pleasure and the sustenance of it — which means baking is not a child of agriculture but very possibly its parent, the appetite for bread being one of the things that first persuaded a wandering people to stay in one place and grow the grain. The loaf is older than the farm. It may be older than the settled human world itself.

There is more in it even than that, because bread is never quite only food. It is the oldest metaphor we have for sustenance itself, the word we reach for when we mean the whole of what keeps body and soul together — daily bread, the bread of life, the breaking of bread. The very word companion is built from it, from the Latin com and panis, the one you break bread with, so that our word for a friend is, at its root, the person you share your loaf with. Every culture that raises bread at all has set it at the centre of its rites of welcome — the loaf and salt carried to the door, the bread torn and passed from hand to hand around the table — because to give someone bread is the plainest possible way of saying you will not go hungry while you are with me, which is the first thing care ever has to say. A slice of bread and butter is what this whole book comes down to, when everything clever has been stripped away: someone took flour and fire and trouble and time, and made a thing to keep another person alive and glad. There is no smaller way to say it, and no larger.

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<figcaption><em>Plate 14. After Taste, complete: the seven volumes standing together as a single set — Flavour, Nourishment, Fire, the World's Tables, the Glutton Club, Garlic, and the Complete Kitchen — the compendium closed at last, and the kitchen door left open.</em></figcaption> </figure>

A Plain Loaf — the last recipe, and the first food

The humblest recipe in seven volumes, and the one that contains them all: flour, water, salt and time, worked by the slow patience of a little yeast into a loaf good enough to share. Make it once, and the whole book is in your hands.

Makes 1 loaf (8–10 slices) · Time 15 minutes' work, spread across about 18 hours

Ingredients

400 g (about 3¼ cups) strong white bread flour, plus a little for dusting
8 g (1½ tsp) fine salt
1 g (¼ tsp) fast-action dried yeast
300 g (300 ml / 1¼ cups) cool water

Method

In a large bowl, stir the flour, salt and yeast together, then pour in the water and mix with a spoon or one hand until no dry flour remains. It will be a rough, sticky, shaggy dough, and that is exactly right — there is no kneading in this bread. Cover the bowl and leave it somewhere cool and out of the way for 12 to 18 hours, until the surface is a mass of small bubbles and the dough has more than doubled. The long wait is the recipe: the yeast and time are quietly doing the work your hands would otherwise do, building flavour and structure while you sleep.
Tip the dough out onto a well-floured surface; it will be loose and alive. With floured hands, fold it over on itself three or four times into a rough round, turning it so the smooth side faces up, and let it settle while the oven heats.
About 30 minutes before baking, put a heavy lidded casserole (cast iron is ideal) into the oven and heat it to 230°C (450°F / gas mark 8). The empty pot heats until it is as hot as the oven itself — this is the trick that gives a home loaf its crust, trapping the dough's own steam close around it like a small brick oven.
Carefully lift out the hot pot. Tip the dough into it, seam-side down, without fussing — it is a forgiving loaf. Cover with the lid and bake for 30 minutes, then take the lid off and bake for a further 10 to 15 minutes, until the crust is deep brown, darker than looks quite sensible, and the loaf sounds hollow when tapped on the base. If you have a thermometer, the centre reads about 96–99°C (205–210°F).
Turn it out onto a rack and — this is the one hard instruction — let it cool completely, at least an hour, before you cut it. A hot loaf is still cooking inside; slice it too soon and the crumb turns gummy. Then cut a thick slice, spread it with cold butter and a scrape of salt, and share it. This is where the book has been going the whole time.

Cook's note: This is a template, not a rule. Once the method is in your hands, the same dough will take a handful of olives or walnuts, a spoonful of seeds, or half its flour swapped for wholemeal. Bread is the safest cooking there is; the only real caution is patience, which the recipe cannot supply and the cook must. Keep the loaf cut-side down on a board for two or three days — and whatever goes stale makes the best toast, the best crumbs, and the beginning of the next good thing.

And there the recipes end, as they had to, on a loaf of bread — the first thing our kind learned to bake and the last thing this book has to teach, which turn out, after everything, to be the same thing. The kitchen is warm, the loaf is cooling on its rack, and the long work of the compendium is very nearly done. What remains is not another technique or another dish, but only the oldest courtesy at the close of any good meal: to clear the table, thank the company, and say goodbye. Turn the page, and let us do it properly.

บทถัดไป · 11 / 16Envoi — The Table Cleared