A Note in Closing

A Note in Closing

A compendium like this one is a magpie's nest, and honesty at the close requires saying so. Nothing in these seven volumes was discovered here. The naturalist's whole trade is to gather — to read the chemists and the cooks, the historians and the anthropologists and the grandmothers, and to carry back in one basket what is usually kept in a dozen separate cupboards. Its debts are therefore enormous and mostly unpayable: to Harold McGee above all, whose great book taught a generation that curiosity is welcome at the stove; to Brillat-Savarin, who proved two centuries ago that one may be learned and delighted at the same table; to Escoffier and Child and every cook who ever wrote a method down so that a stranger might eat well; and to the countless anonymous kitchens, in every country and century, that worked all of this out long before anyone thought to explain it. What this book tried to add was not fact but frame — a way of seeing the whole, from the molecule to the shared meal, as one continuous and marvellous thing.

And its one wish for the reader is the simplest it could make. Not that you should remember what is in these pages; you will not, and it does not matter. Only that, the next time you stand at a stove, you might do it a little more awake — tasting as you go, noticing what the heat and the salt and the time are doing, and remembering, as you carry the plate to the table, that you are performing the oldest kindness there is. Cook with attention. Feed the people you love. The rest of it — all seven volumes of the rest of it — was only ever in service of that.