Envoi — The Lingering Taste

Envoi — The Lingering Taste

There is a word for what a fine mouthful leaves behind once it has gone: the after taste, the ghost of a flavour that outlasts the swallow and, in the best of cases, sends one reaching for a second spoonful before the first has fairly faded. It seemed the only possible name for a work that hopes to do the same — to leave, once the reading is done, some lingering savour of understanding that makes the next meal taste a little more vivid than the last.

This first volume has kept, deliberately, to the threshold of the kitchen. We have examined the instrument and not yet played it; we have taken the confederation of the senses apart, member by member, and watched taste, smell, browning, seasoning, savour, texture and the meddling mind each give its evidence in turn. What we have not yet done is eat a single proper meal. That is by design. One must know the parliament before one can follow the debate.

The volumes to come will carry us forward — into the body, where flavour becomes nourishment; into the fire and the ferment, where raw things are made sublime; out across the world's great tables; to the far, strange edge of the explorer's appetite; into the beloved and much-maligned company of garlic; and at last into the working kitchen itself, where everything examined in these pages sits down together and is, finally, cooked. Each volume will wear the dress of a slightly later age than the one before it, until the series arrives, blinking, at a table not yet set.

For now, Reader, close the book and go and taste something — anything — with the small new attention these pages have tried to earn. That attention, and the pleasure it deepens, is the whole of the after taste we hoped to leave.