🧂Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat

Four things decide whether food tastes good: salt brings out flavour, fat carries it and makes texture, acid balances, and heat decides what the food becomes. Learn what each one does and how to adjust it by tasting, and a recipe turns from a set of orders into a suggestion.

• A birthday present from Emil Reuter in March, handed over the counter with the words read the first half, cook the second. It sat on the shelf for four months looking at me.
• Started on Saturday 26 July, the day of the binoculars, when things had begun to lift. Finished on Friday 15 August.
• Half the book is four long lessons and half is recipes. I read the lessons straight through like a textbook, which nobody warned me a cookbook could be, and Wendy MacNaughton's drawings make the charts a pleasure.
• It changed how I salt. Earlier, more, and from higher up. Jonas noticed in a week and Emil pretended not to.
• Book eleven for 🎯 Finish 16 books and keep notes on the ones that matter, and the only one this year with olive oil on page 57.
• Inscribed, in Emil's capitals: salt first.
• Yes, the quote filed with a cookbook is 🏛️ Francis Bacon's 💬 Some books are to be tasted. This one was tasted, then chewed and digested, more or less in his order.
• Taste, adjust, taste again is a feedback loop with a spoon in it. I did not expect the systems vocabulary to follow me to the stove.