Envoi — The Table Cleared

Envoi — The Table Cleared

Every meal ends the same way, if it has gone well: not with a flourish but with a slow, contented clearing — the plates stacked, the candles pinched out, the last of the wine finished standing up, the good tiredness of people who have been well fed. A book of this kind should end the same way, and this one now does. Seven volumes ago, After Taste set out with an appetite dressed as a question — what is this thing we do three times a day and mostly fail to notice? — and it has spent every page since in answering, from the chemistry of the first taste on the tongue to the last loaf cooling on its rack. The table is cleared now. There is nothing left to serve.

Look back once, from the door, at the whole of it. The compendium began with flavour, the secret life of taste; went on to nourishment, and what a meal becomes inside the body that eats it; then to fire and ferment, the two great powers of transformation; then out to the world's great tables, where every people alive has answered hunger in its own complete and beautiful way; then to the far edge of the plate with the glutton club, where curiosity is taught its manners; then close, very close, to a single bulb of garlic, and the proof that anything looked at with enough love will open into everything; and at the last into the complete kitchen, where all of it was finally put to work over a real flame. Six questions and one long answer — which was always the same answer wearing different clothes: that to cook and to eat with attention is not a small thing done to stay alive, but one of the truest and oldest ways a human being has of loving the world and the people in it.

Let it be said plainly, because the reader has earned plainness: this is the end. There is no eighth volume waiting, no further shelf to fill. Seven was the number this compendium always meant to reach, and it has reached it — and a thing that knows how to end is rarer, and better, than a thing that only knows how to continue. The naturalist has said what he came to say. What is left is not on the page at all. It is in the kitchen, where it always was, waiting for you.

And so, reader — companion, the word this book has taught you, the one you break bread with — thank you. Thank you for the long attention; for coming all this way, through the flavour and the fire and the far tables, to arrive, as everything worth doing arrives, back at your own stove. These books were never the meal. They were only the invitation. The meal is the one you are about to make — tonight, or tomorrow, for someone who will be glad of it — and it is, and always was, better than anything that could be written about it. The table is cleared. The kitchen is yours. Go and cook, with all our love; and eat well, and feed one another, for as long as you are lucky enough to be hungry.

Here ends After Taste. Here begins your dinner.