A Glossary of the Kitchen

A Glossary of the Kitchen

The working vocabulary of a cook, earned across seven volumes and gathered in one place at the last — from the first cut to the newest ferment.

Mise en place — literally "putting in place": the cook's practice of preparing and arranging every ingredient before the heat goes on. Less a chore than a way of thinking, it is the calm that makes fast cooking possible.

Conduction, convection and radiation — the three ways heat travels to food, and the reason each method behaves as it does: conduction by direct contact (the pan against the steak), convection by a moving fluid (hot air circling an oven, water rolling in a pot), and radiation by infrared waves leaping a gap (the grill, the glowing coals). Naming which is at work is the first step to controlling it.

Leidenfrost point — the temperature, around 200°C on metal, at which a droplet of water no longer spreads and boils but rides on a thin cushion of its own vapour, skating across the surface whole. It is the cook's oldest test that a pan is hot enough to sear rather than to steam.

The knife cuts — the standard geometry of cutting: the matchstick julienne, the tiny even brunoise dice, the ribboned chiffonade of stacked leaves. Pieces of a uniform size cook at a uniform rate, so an even cut is not vanity but the plainest guarantee of even cooking.

Sweat — to cook vegetables, onions above all, gently in a little fat over low heat until they soften and turn sweet without taking any colour; the quiet first move under a great many dishes.

Render — to melt the fat slowly out of meat or skin over gentle heat, leaving the solids crisp and yielding a clean, flavourful cooking fat — duck fat, lardons, the golden slick a good sausage gives up.

Maillard reaction — the cascade of browning reactions between amino acids and sugars, driven by heat, that turns a pale surface brown and builds hundreds of new savoury, roasted aromas. The chemistry behind the sear, the crust and the crackling.

Sear — to brown the surface of food hard and fast in fierce dry heat, driving the Maillard reaction to build flavour and colour; the single most transferable move in cooking, learned as readily at a wok as at a pan.

Fond — the browned residue left stuck to a pan after searing meat or vegetables; not a mess to be scrubbed away but concentrated flavour waiting to be reclaimed.

Deglaze — to pour liquid (wine, stock, water) into a hot pan and lift the fond from its base, dissolving that stuck flavour into the beginnings of a sauce.

Reduction — the simple, powerful act of simmering a liquid to drive off water and concentrate what remains, thickening a sauce and deepening its flavour by patience alone.

Stock — the savoury liquid drawn by long simmering from bones, trimmings and aromatics; the quiet foundation on which soups, sauces and braises are built, and the cook's first lesson in making much from little.

Mother sauce — in the classical French scheme codified by Escoffier, one of the small family of foundational sauces (béchamel, velouté, espagnole, tomato, hollandaise) from which countless others are derived; the grammar of sauce-making reduced to its roots.

Emulsion — a stable suspension of one liquid in another that would rather not mix, most often oil in water, coaxed together by an emulsifier and a steady hand: the physics of vinaigrette, mayonnaise, hollandaise and aïoli.

Brine — a solution of salt in water in which food is soaked before cooking; it seasons throughout and helps meat hold its moisture, and, given time and the right microbes, it becomes the medium of fermentation itself.

Dry-brine — the same idea without the water: salting meat or fish and leaving it uncovered in the cold, well ahead of cooking, so the salt seasons all the way through while the surface dries — which then browns far better than a wet one ever could.

Braise — to cook tough cuts slowly in a little liquid, low and long, until collagen melts and the meat surrenders; the patient method by which the cheapest, hardest-working parts of an animal become the most tender.

Collagen and gelatine — collagen is the tough connective protein that makes a cut of meat chewy; held long enough in gentle moist heat, it breaks down into gelatine, which gives a braise its silk and a good stock its body.

Temper — to bring two things gently into agreement rather than shock: to warm eggs slowly with a little hot liquid before they meet the rest, so they thicken a custard instead of scrambling; more broadly, the cook's art of the careful, gradual join.

Umami — the fifth basic taste, the savoury depth of glutamate and certain nucleotides, present in aged cheese, cured meat, tomatoes, mushrooms, seaweed and long-cooked stocks; the taste a cook reaches for when a dish is complete but somehow not yet full.

Umami synergy — the discovery that lay hidden inside umami: glutamate tastes several times more savoury in the company of the nucleotides inosinate (from meat and fish) or guanylate (from dried mushrooms), so that dashi of kelp and bonito, or Parmesan over tomato, or bacon with mushrooms, tastes far greater than the sum of its parts. The hidden arithmetic behind a thousand instinctive pairings.

Fermentation — the controlled transformation of food by microbes — yeasts, moulds and bacteria — that preserves it and remakes its flavour; the slow cooking, without fire, behind bread, cheese, wine, miso, kimchi and a great deal of what we most love to eat.

Koji (Aspergillus oryzae) — the domesticated mould, grown on steamed rice, barley or soy beans, that powers the great East Asian ferments — miso, soy sauce, sake, mirin — by flooding food with enzymes that cleave starch and protein into sugars and savoury glutamates. The quiet engine of both the oldest larders and the newest kitchens.

Sous-vide — low-temperature cooking, from the French for "under vacuum": food sealed in a pouch and held in water kept at a precise, gentle temperature, so it cooks evenly from edge to centre and cannot overshoot the heat of the bath. The plainest demonstration that heat control, not heat, is the master variable.

Wok hei — Cantonese for "the breath of the wok": the seared, faintly smoky character that food takes on only when it is tossed fast over ferocious heat, and droplets of oil and juice flash into flame and perfume it in seconds; the soul of a good stir-fry, and the hardest thing to win on a domestic hob.

Blooming (of spices) — briefly frying whole or ground spices in hot fat — the Indian tarka or tadka — to dissolve and release their fat-soluble aromas before they meet the rest of the dish; the reason a good curry so often begins with spices sizzling in oil rather than dropped into liquid.

Nixtamalisation — the ancient Mesoamerican process of simmering and steeping maize in an alkaline bath of slaked lime or wood ash, which loosens the hulls, transforms the grain into workable masa, and unlocks the niacin the body cannot otherwise absorb; the chemistry that stands behind every tortilla.

Nose-to-tail and root-to-leaf — the whole-ingredient ethic that lets nothing edible go to the bin: bones and trimmings to the stockpot, the less-loved cuts and offal to the table, and the stalks, tops, peels and leaves of vegetables put to use rather than thrown out. Thrift and respect folded into a single habit.