Envoi — The Endless Table

Envoi — The Endless Table

No single volume could hold the world's cooking, and this one has not tried. It has tried, instead, to travel honestly — to sit at each table as a guest rather than a tourist, to learn a few dishes as the people who cook them daily would recognise them, and to resist, at every turn, the flattening of a living culture into a postcard. If the reader carries away only one conviction from this grand tour, let it be this: that there is no such thing as "ethnic food," only food — every one of these traditions as deep, as technical, as worthy of a lifetime's study as the French canon that Western books so long treated as the measure of all the rest.

We have seen, too, that no table stands still. The chilli that now seems eternal to Sichuan and Thailand crossed an ocean five centuries ago; the tomato that defines Italy is a New World transplant; the very idea of a "national cuisine" is often younger than the railways. Cuisines are not museums but living things — migrating, adapting, borrowing, and, in our own industrial age, sometimes eroding. To love the world's tables is also to notice what globalisation quietly takes, and to help keep it.

From the shared and public feast we turn, in the volume to come, to its strangest and most private frontier. Volume V, The Glutton Club, follows the naturalist's daring palate to the very edge of the world — to the foods few will try, and the explorer-gourmands who tried them anyway.