Preface — The Transforming Hand

Preface — The Transforming Hand

"Art is man's expression of his joy in labour. If these are not Professor Ruskin's words they embody at least his teaching on this subject." — William Morris, Art Under Plutocracy, lecture delivered at University College, Oxford, 14 November 1883

T he first two volumes of this compendium were content, on the whole, to leave the ingredient alone. Volume I knelt at the table and asked only why a thing delights — why sugar undoes an infant before it has learned a single word, why the char on a crust smells of something neither flour nor flame possessed alone. Volume II followed the swallowed mouthful into the body's own dim workshops, the gut and the liver and the small unglamorous furnace of the cell, and asked what that mouthful does once delight has had its moment and duty takes over. In neither volume did the compiler's own hand do very much. The peach was already ripe; the loaf was already baked; the naturalist's task was chiefly to kneel and look closely at what nature and other people's kitchens had already accomplished.

That comfortable distance ends here. This volume concerns itself with the hand that intervenes — the one that takes a raw and often unpromising thing, a fibrous root, a bucket of milk, a haunch of meat too tough to chew, and by the deliberate application of heat, or time, or salt, or a colony of invisible and willing microbes, turns it into something the raw material never remotely resembled. Cookery, considered honestly, is not chiefly a matter of taste, though taste is its reward; it is a branch of applied transformation, as old as any technology our species has ever practised, and a good deal older than the wheel, the alphabet, or the wearing of clothes. Long before humankind learned to smelt ore or spin thread, it had learned to turn the inedible into the sublime by holding it near a fire, or burying it in salt, or simply leaving it alone in a jar and trusting a stranger's yeast to finish the argument. This volume is the record of that older and more intimate craft: fire, ferment, salt, sugar, and the patient hand that learned, across some hundreds of thousands of years of trial, to direct them.

It seems right, given that turn from observation to intervention, that the volume's own manner should turn with it. The series has always promised to age forward decade by decade upon the shelf, its paper and its plates advancing with each instalment toward a kitchen not yet built; and if Volumes I and II wore something of an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naturalist's coat, this one dresses for the workshop rather than the drawing room. Its illustrations favour the clean geometry of an engineer's plate over the ornamental flourish of an earlier age; its temper is that of the well-made tool, honestly used and honestly shown, in the spirit of the guild rather than the salon. This is, in other words, an Arts-and-Crafts volume, and it keeps company deliberately with the generation of makers — Ruskin thundering from his lectern about the nobility of the working hand, Morris setting his own loom and his own dye-vat in evidence of the argument — who insisted, at the very moment industry was learning to make everything and understand nothing, that the person who shapes a material with skill and respect is engaged in something more serious than mere labour. It is worth noting, too, that Morris's own famous sentence on the subject was not, by his own admission, entirely his: he borrowed its spirit from Ruskin and confessed as much in the same breath he uttered it, which is itself a small lesson this volume means to take to heart. Craft is rarely a solitary inheritance. The cook who sears a steak correctly is drawing, whether she knows it or not, on a chain of instruction stretching back past her own grandmother to the first forager who noticed that meat held too near the coals grew savoury rather than merely warm, and had the wit to do it again on purpose.

The maker's reverence this volume asks the reader to adopt is not sentimentality about "the old ways," a phrase this compendium regards with some suspicion. It is, rather, a due respect for materials on their own terms — for the particular way copper conducts heat, the particular manner in which gluten forms a net, the particular chemistry by which a colony of lactic-acid bacteria can be persuaded to preserve a cabbage for a winter. Respect of that kind is earned by understanding, not assumed by nostalgia, and it is the same rigorous, curious, unsentimental attention this compendium brought to the tongue and the gut that it now brings to the pan, the crock, and the smokehouse.

That same rigour obliges one further, and rather more solemn, undertaking, and it is best stated plainly at the outset rather than buried in a footnote once the reader's guard is down. Craft of the kind this volume celebrates has always lived beside genuine danger, and a book that romanticises the hearth, the barrel, and the curing shed while quietly omitting what can go wrong in each of them is not honouring the tradition it claims to admire — it is betraying it. The forager who first left meat too near a low, airless heat, or milk too long in an unwashed pail, sometimes poisoned the table rather than improved it; the difference between a cured ham and a dangerous one, between a living ferment and a fatal one, has always been a matter of specific, learnable, unforgiving science — the pH of a pickle, the salt of a cure, the anaerobic conditions in which a particular and lethal toxin quietly thrives. Every chapter of this volume that touches fire hot enough to char, or a ferment left to its own microbial devices, or a cure meant to outlast the season, will therefore pause, honestly and without alarm, to explain not merely how the transformation is done but why it is safe when it is safe, and precisely where the hazard begins when it is not. This is not a caveat grudgingly appended to satisfy a modern anxiety. It is, this volume insists, the very heart of craftsmanship itself: the maker who does not understand the danger in the material has not yet mastered it, whatever else may be said of the dinner produced along the way.

Let us begin, then, where every craft of transformation on this earth in fact began, and where this compendium's own patron naturalists — Brillat-Savarin with his wit, McGee with his rigour — would both agree the story properly opens: at the fire.

Before salt, before the starter jar, before the smokehouse, there was the flame — the first tool that was not held in the hand but tended beside it. Chapter One takes up the taming of fire.