Envoi — From the Bulb to the Kitchen

Envoi — From the Bulb to the Kitchen

This volume set out to prove that a single ingredient, looked at closely enough, contains a whole compendium — and garlic, of all the world's foods, rewards the looking. We began with the plant and ended with a declaration of love, and in between passed through chemistry, history, geography, craft and the honest ledger of medicine, and found the bulb inexhaustible at every turn. That is the naturalist's oldest lesson, restated one final time before the series closes: that curiosity is not a quantity of things known but a quality of attention paid, and that the humblest object on the table will, if properly attended, open into everything.

One volume remains. Six have asked what flavour is, what food does in the body, how the raw is transformed, how the world sets its tables, how far curiosity may travel, and what a single beloved bulb can teach. The seventh and last, After Taste — The Complete Kitchen, stops asking and starts cooking: it gathers the whole compendium's learning into the one room where it was always headed, and hands the reader an apron. The naturalist has done the studying. What remains is the doing.