Envoi — From the Whole Kingdom to a Single Bulb

Envoi — From the Whole Kingdom to a Single Bulb

This volume set out to chase curiosity to the edge of the plate, and it has been a long way to the edge: from an undergraduate's dining club in Cambridge to the mess of a surveying brig, from the ferment-shops of Reykjavík and Kalmar and Sardinia to the insect markets that feed two billion people, from the psychology of a flinch to the ethics of a hard line, and out at last to a hut in the Antarctic dark where men toasted the turning of the year with seal soup and champagne. It has been, deliberately, the widest volume in this compendium — the one that tried to hold the whole daring animal kingdom in a single pair of hands. The reward of so wide a reach is wonder. Its risk, named in the Preface and guarded against in every chapter, is that wonder can curdle into a freak-show, and the whole book has been an argument that it need not, so long as the curiosity is genuine, the respect is real, and the harm is refused.

The volume to come does the opposite thing entirely, and does it on purpose. Having swept the horizon, the compendium now turns for home and narrows its gaze to almost nothing — to one plant, one pungent, indispensable, universally beloved bulb, and the astonishing amount of the world's cooking that quietly leans on it. Volume VI, In Praise of Garlic, is the patron's own favourite, promised to him in advance, and it is offered here with affection as the natural answer to everything this volume has been: after the whole kingdom chased to the ends of the earth, a single clove, crushed under the flat of a knife, releasing the one smell that says, in almost every kitchen on the planet, that supper is about to begin. Curiosity, it turns out, does not only travel outward. It also comes home, and learns to love one thing completely.