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FOREWORD

As I write these words, this book hasn’t even been published yet, but already it feels indispensable.

That must sound over-the-top, I know, but I honestly can’t remember the last time I read a book on cooking that was this useful or unusual. I suspect that’s because reading Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat feels less like being in the pages of a cookbook than at a really good cooking school, standing in your apron around the butcher-block island listening as a smart, eloquent, and occasionally hilarious chef demonstrates how to repair a broken mayonnaise. (Add a few drops of water and then “whisk with the urgency of a swimmer escaping a shark.”) Now she passes around the bowl of silky, no-longer-broken emulsion so you can dip a tasting spoon and feel it on your tongue. I get it.

In Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, Samin Nosrat manages to take us so much deeper and farther into the art of cooking than cookbooks ordinarily do. That’s because her book offers so much more than recipes, a literary genre that, while useful, has severe limitations. A well-written and thoroughly tested recipe might tell you how to produce the dish in question, but it won’t teach you anything about how to cook, not really. Truth be told, recipes are infantilising: Just do exactly what I say, they say, but don’t ask questions or worry your little head about why. They insist on fidelity and faith, but do nothing to earn or explain it.

Think how much more we learn—and retain!—when a teacher doesn’t just enumerate the step-by-step instructions but explains the principles behind them. Armed with reasons, we no longer have to cling to a recipe like a lifeboat; now we can strike out on our own and begin to improvise.

Even though it contains plenty of excellent recipes, this is a book concerned foremost with principles. Samin Nosrat has taken the sprawling, daunting, multicultural subject we call cooking and boldly distilled it to four essential elements—or five, if you count the core principle of tasting along the way. Master these principles, she promises, and you will be able to cook delicious food of any kind, in any tradition, whether a salad dressing or a braise or a galette. Season food with the proper amount of salt at the proper moment; choose the optimal medium of fat to convey the flavour of your ingredients; balance and animate those ingredients with acid; apply the right type and quantity of heat for the proper amount of time—do all this and you will turn out vibrant and beautiful food, with or without a recipe. It’s a big promise, but if you take her course—i.e. read this book—you will find that Samin delivers. Whether you are new to cooking or have decades of experience under your apron, you will understand how to build striking new layers of flavour in whatever you cook.

Besides being a gifted and deeply experienced cook with years of experience in some of the best kitchens in the Bay Area, Samin is a natural teacher—exacting, inspiring, and eloquent. I happen to know this firsthand, because Samin, who had once been my writing student, became my cooking teacher when I set out to research my book Cooked.

We had met a decade earlier, after Samin had written asking if she could audit my graduate class in food journalism at Berkeley. Letting her in was one of the best decisions I’ve made, not only as a professor of writing but as an eater of food. Samin more than held her own with the journalists in the class, demonstrating the winning voice and surefooted prose now on display in this book, but she really put the rest of us in the shade when it came to snack.

This being a class about food, naturally we ate, taking turns each week bringing in a “storied snack”— some food item or dish that tells a little story, whether about the student’s background, project, or passion. We’ve snacked on baguettes salvaged from a Dumpster; on foraged mushrooms and weeds; and on ethnic foods of every description, but we seldom got to consume more than a bite or two plus the story. Samin served us a whole meal: a sumptuous spinach lasagna made completely from scratch and served on actual plates with linens and silverware, items that had never before crossed the threshold of my classroom. While we ate the best lasagna any of us had ever tasted, Samin told us the story of how she learned to make pasta, mixing the flour and eggs by hand, while in Florence, apprenticed to Benedetta Vitali, one of her most influential teachers. We were all captivated, as much by her storytelling as her cooking.

So years later, when I decided to get serious about cooking, there was no question whom I would ask to teach me. Samin agreed immediately, and so once a month for more than a year, she would come over, usually on a Sunday afternoon, and together we would cook a three-course meal, each one organised around a different theme. Samin would burst into the kitchen with her market bags, apron, and roll of knives, announcing the theme of that day’s lesson, which often matched the principles laid out in this book. “Today we’re going to learn all about emulsions.” (Which she memorably described as “a temporary peace treaty between fat and water.”) If meat were on the syllabus, Samin would often stop by or phone the night before, to make sure the roast or chicken was properly seasoned, which is to say early and amply: at least twenty-four hours in advance, with about five times as much salt as your cardiologist would recommend.

The sessions began as one-on-one tutorials, with Samin and me chopping and chatting around the kitchen island, but in time, my wife, Judith, and our son, Isaac, found themselves drawn into the kitchen by the aromas and the laughter emanating from it. It seemed a shame not to share the delicious meals we began turning out more widely, so we began inviting friends to join us for dinner, and in time, our friends began arriving earlier and earlier in the evening and then in the afternoon, so that they might help roll out a piecrust on the kitchen island or turn the crank on the pasta machine as Isaac fed it amber discs of eggy dough.

There is something infectious about Samin’s teaching, in the combination of her passion, humour, and patience, but especially in her ability to break the most complex operation down into steps that immediately made sense because she never failed to explain the principle behind them. You salted meat so early to give it time to diffuse into the muscle, where it dissolves strands of proteins into a liquid-retaining gel, thus making for moister meat at the same time it builds flavour from the inside out. Every such step has a little story behind it; and as soon as you know it, the step makes perfect sense and, eventually, it becomes second nature, part of your culinary muscle memory.

Yet as logical and even scientific as Samin can be about the techniques she’s imparting, in the end she believes cooking with distinction depends on tasting and smelling—on educating our senses and then learning to trust them. “Taste, taste, and then taste again,” she would tell me, even as I did something as simple and seemingly boring as sautéing an onion. Yet there was an intricate evolution unfolding in that pan as the rectangles of onion went from crisply acidic to clean and sweet to faintly smoky as they caramelised and then bittered slightly as they browned. She showed me how a half dozen distinct flavours could be teased from that single humble ingredient, all depending on how you managed principle number four, heat—and deployed your senses, for each stage in the onion’s evolution carried its own distinct and learnable aroma. Now what recipe ever conveyed all that? As Samin likes to say, quoting another of her teachers, “Recipes don’t make food taste good. People do.”

What I love most about this book is that Samin has somehow found a way (with the help of Wendy MacNaughton’s equally inspired and informative illustrations) to bring both her passion for, and intelligence about, cooking to the page. The result is a book that instructs and delights in equal measure (no mean feat in any piece of writing) and one that I predict will soon find its place on the short shelf of books on cooking that you can’t imagine living without. You will want to make room for this one.

—Michael Pollan