Preface — A Table Set for the Whole World

Preface — A Table Set for the Whole World

"La cuisine, c'est quand les choses ont le goût de ce qu'elles sont." "Cuisine is when things taste of what they are." — Curnonsky (Maurice Edmond Sailland), elected "Prince des Gastronomes" by popular ballot, Paris-Soir, 1927

T he first three volumes of this compendium kept the naturalist mostly at a single table, asking what flavour is, what it does to the body, and how the mind hungers. Volume IV sends the naturalist travelling. The itinerary that follows crosses seven regions and, by the loosest of counts, several dozen nations, in the manner of the great mid-century culinary voyages — the steamer trunk stickered with ports of call, the notebook filling with menus copied out in unfamiliar hands, the conviction, not yet embarrassed by hindsight, that the world's tables were there to be visited, tasted, and understood. It is a beguiling posture, and this volume borrows its warmth and its curiosity without, we hope, borrowing its blind spots.

Those blind spots are worth naming before the journey begins, because the era that supplies this book's travel-poster palette — the 1950s and 1960s, when jet travel and the illustrated cookbook first made the world's cuisines seem newly reachable from a suburban kitchen — was not an innocent one. It produced Elizabeth David's A Book of Mediterranean Food and Waverley Root's The Food of France, works of real scholarship and real love; it also produced a great deal of condescension dressed as adventure, in which other people's dinners became curiosities to be "discovered," their cooks reduced to colourful extras in someone else's holiday. The travelling gastronome this volume tries to embody is, we hope, a different sort of guest: one who eats at the family table before the restaurant, who asks a dish's name and troubles to spell it correctly, who understands that being welcomed into a kitchen is a privilege extended by its owners and not a service purchased by the curious. Curiosity is the engine of this book. Respect is its steering.

The Authenticity Mandate

We state the governing rule of this volume plainly, because it is the rule most easily broken by a book of this kind, and because breaking it is this volume's gravest risk. Call it the Authenticity Mandate. Every chapter that follows is bound by four commitments. First, to write each cuisine from within: to begin at the domestic table, with what is actually cooked on an ordinary Tuesday, rather than with the banqueting hall, the tourist menu, or the dish that photographs best. Second, to name real names — the cooks and scholars of and from each culture, Fuchsia Dunlop on China, Madhur Jaffrey on India, Claudia Roden on the Levant, Diana Kennedy on Mexico, Paula Wolfert on North Africa, Edna Lewis on the American South, Jessica B. Harris on the African diaspora, and a great many others who will be introduced, properly, as this tour reaches their kitchens — rather than borrowing their authority without their names attached. Third, to get the particulars right: a dish's correct name, its correct region, its correct method, checked rather than assumed, because a caricature is very often simply a fact someone declined to verify. And fourth, to tell the truth about friction — migration, conquest, famine, the slave ship's hold, the refrigerated container — because no cuisine on earth arrived at its present form by standing still, and the pretence that any of them did is itself a kind of disrespect.

That last commitment deserves a further word, because it cuts against the very travel-poster mood this volume otherwise borrows. The mid-century imagination loved the idea of the timeless village, its grandmother stirring a pot exactly as her grandmother had. It is a lovely image and, examined honestly, almost never a true one. The tomato that seems to define Italian cooking arrived from the Americas after 1492 and took the better part of two centuries to be trusted at an Italian table. The chilli that seems inseparable from Thai and Sichuan cooking made the same Atlantic crossing at the same historical moment, carried by the same ships and the same violent commerce, before it ever reached an Asian kitchen. The okra and the rice technique of the American South arrived in the holds of slave ships, carried in the memory of enslaved cooks who had no choice in the crossing and every claim on what their knowledge produced. Cuisines are not museums. They are conversations still being had, and this volume tries to report the conversation rather than photograph a single frozen frame of it and call the photograph the truth.

Reading the Tour

The tour is organised, roughly, by region rather than by nation, on the theory that flavour crosses borders more readily than passports do: a chapter on the European canon, one on the Mediterranean and the Levant, one on the spice roads of South and Southeast Asia, one on the Far East, one on the Americas, one on Africa and its vast diaspora, and a final chapter that steps back to ask how cuisines actually form, borrow, and change at all. Each chapter keeps the naturalist's habits from earlier volumes — the epigraph, the drop-capped opening, a single dish or ingredient held up for close study as a Field Note, an authentic home recipe rendered in both metric and imperial measure, and at least one illustrated plate — but each is written, so far as care and verification allow, in the voice and from the vantage of the culture it visits, rather than as a foreigner's inventory of curiosities.

Two honest admissions belong here as well. This is a tour, not an atlas: seven chapters cannot hold every table on earth, and the omission of a region reflects the limits of one book rather than any judgement on the cooking left out — a fact the closing chapter returns to directly. And the naturalist writing this volume is, like any traveller, a guest in most of the kitchens described, dependent on the generosity of the scholars and cooks who have spent lifetimes, not chapters, earning the knowledge passed on here. Where this book succeeds, the credit belongs chiefly to them. Where it falls short of the Authenticity Mandate it has just set for itself, the fault is the author's alone, and the reader is owed nothing less than honesty about that risk before the journey begins.

The itinerary opens, as European itineraries so often have, on the continent that spent three centuries convincing the rest of the world its own cooking was the cuisine, definite article intended. Chapter One asks what became of that claim, and what it left out.