Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Samin Nosrat

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      Since the menu at Chez Panisse changes daily, each kitchen shift begins with a menu meeting. The cooks sit down with the chef, who details his or her vision for each dish while everyone shells peas or peels garlic. He might talk about his inspiration for the meal—a trip to the coast of Spain, or a story he’d read in the New Yorker years ago. She might even detail a few specifics—a particular herb to use, a precise way to slice the carrots, a sketch of the final plate on the back of a scrap of paper—before assigning a dish to each cook.

      As an intern, sitting in on menu meetings was inspiring and terror-inducing in equal measure. Gourmet magazine had just named Chez Panisse the best restaurant in the country, and I was surrounded by some of the best cooks in the world. Just hearing them talk about food was enormously educational. Daube provençal, Moroccan tagine, calçots con romesco, cassoulet toulousain, abbacchio alla romana, maiale al latte: these were the words of a foreign language. The names of the dishes were enough to send my mind reeling, but the cooks rarely consulted cookbooks. How did they all seem to know how to cook anything the chef could imagine?

      I felt like I’d never catch up. I could hardly imagine the day would come when I’d be able to recognise all of the spices in the kitchen’s unlabelled jars. I could barely tell cumin and fennel seeds apart, so the thought of getting to a point where I could ever appreciate the nuanced differences between Provençal bouillabaisse and Tuscan cacciucco (two Mediterranean seafood stews that appeared to be identical) seemed downright impossible.

      I asked questions of everyone, every day. I read, cooked, tasted, and also wrote about food, all in an effort to deepen my understanding. I visited farms and farmers’ markets and learned my way around their wares. Gradually the chefs gave me more responsibility, from frying tiny, gleaming anchovies for the first course to folding perfect little ravioli for the second to butchering beef for the third. These thrills sustained me as I made innumerable mistakes—some small, such as being sent to retrieve coriander and returning with parsley because I couldn’t tell the difference, and some large, like the time I burned the rich beef sauce for a dinner we hosted for the First Lady.

      As I improved, I began to detect the nuances that distinguish good food from great. I started to discern individual components in a dish, understanding when the pasta water and not the sauce needed more salt, or when an herb salsa needed more vinegar to balance a rich, sweet lamb stew. I started to see some basic patterns in the seemingly impenetrable maze of daily-changing, seasonal menus. Tough cuts of meat were salted the night before, while delicate fish fillets were seasoned at the time of cooking. Oil for frying had to be hot—otherwise the food would end up soggy—while butter for tart dough had to remain cold, so that the crust would crisp up and become flaky. A squeeze of lemon or splash of vinegar could improve almost every salad, soup, and braise. Certain cuts of meat were always grilled, while others were always braised.

      Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat were the four elements that guided basic decision making in every single dish, no matter what. The rest was just a combination of cultural, seasonal, or technical details, for which we could consult cookbooks and experts, histories, and maps. It was a revelation.

      The idea of making consistently great food had seemed like some inscrutable mystery, but now I had a little mental checklist to think about every time I set foot in a kitchen: Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. I mentioned the theory to one of the chefs. He smiled at me, as if to say, “Duh. Everyone knows that.”

      But everyone didn’t know that. I’d never heard or read it anywhere, and certainly no one had ever explicitly related the idea to me. Once I understood it, and once it had been confirmed by a professional chef, it seemed inconceivable that no one had ever framed things in this way for people interested in learning how to cook. I decided then I’d write a book elucidating the revelation for other amateur cooks.

      I picked up a legal pad and started writing. That was seventeen years ago. At twenty years old, I’d been cooking for only a year. I quickly realised I still had a lot to learn about both food and writing before I could begin to instruct anyone else. I set the book aside. As I kept reading, writing, and cooking, I filtered everything I learned through my newfound understanding of Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat into a tidy system of culinary thinking.

      Like a scholar in search of primary sources, a desire to experience authentic versions of the dishes I loved so much at Chez Panisse took me to Italy. In Florence, I apprenticed myself to the groundbreaking Tuscan chef Benedetta Vitali at her restaurant, Zibibbo. At first it was a constant challenge to work in an unfamiliar kitchen where I barely spoke the language, where temperatures were measured in Celsius, and where measurements were metric. But my understanding of Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat quickly gave me my bearings. I might not have known all of the specifics, but the way Benedetta taught me to brown meat for ragù, heat olive oil for sautéing, season the pasta water, and use lemon juice as a foil for rich flavours echoed what I had learned back in California.

      I spent my days off in the hills of Chianti with Dario Cecchini, an eighth-generation butcher with a huge personality and an even bigger heart. Dario took me under his wing, teaching me about whole-animal butchery and Tuscan food heritage with equal vigour. He took me all over the region to meet farmers, vintners, bakers, and cheese makers. From them, I learned how geography, the seasons, and history have shaped Tuscan cooking philosophy over the course of centuries: fresh, if modest, ingredients, when treated with care, can deliver the deepest flavours.

      My pursuit of flavour has continued to lead me around the world. Fuelled by curiosity, I’ve sampled my way through the oldest pickle shop in China, observed the nuanced regional differences of lentil dishes in Pakistan, experienced the way a complicated political history has diluted flavours in Cuban kitchens by restricting access to ingredients, and compared varieties of heirloom corn in Mexican tortillas. When unable to travel, I have read extensively, interviewed immigrant grandmothers, and tasted their traditional cooking. No matter my circumstances or whereabouts, as reliably as the points on a compass, Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat have set me on the path to good food every time I cook.