MacNaughton Wendy - Salt, fat, acid, heat: mastering the elements of good cooking

Praise for SALT FAT ACID HEAT

This beautiful, approachable book not only teaches you how to cook, but captures how it should feel to cook: full of exploration, spontaneity, and joy. Samin is one of the great teachers I know, and wins people over to cooking with real foodorganic, seasonal, and alivewith her irrepressible enthusiasm and curiosity.

Alice Waters, New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Simple Food

Everyone was impressed when Michael Pollan managed to summarise the huge and complex subject of what we should be eating in just seven words: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. Samin Nosrat has managed to summarise the huge and complex subject of how we should be cooking in just four words: salt, fat, acid, heat. Everyone will be hugely impressed.

Yotam Ottolenghi, New York Times bestselling author of Jerusalem

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is a must for anyone wanting to be a better cook. Samin Nosrat, along with Wendy MacNaughtons fun illustrations, teaches the fundamentals of cooking and dives into the four elements that make food taste great. So do yourself a favour and buy this book. I promise you wont regret it.

April Bloomfield, James Beard Awardwinning chef and author of A Girl and Her Pig

Like the amazing meals that come out of Samin Nosrats kitchen, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is the perfect mixture of highest-quality ingredients: beautiful storytelling, clear science, an infectious love of food, and Wendy MacNaughtons powerful art. Nosrats prose combined with MacNaughtons beautiful illustrations are a perfect guide to employing the science of cooking for maximum deliciousness.

Rebecca Skloot, New York Times bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is a very important book not because it contains many excellent recipes, although it does, or because it is written by a Chez Panisse alum, although it is. It is important because it gives home cooks a compass with which to navigate their own kitchens, and it places trust in them that they will be able to use that compass. Samins easygoing, cook-by-feel approach is never condescending or elitist. It is a step towards cooking without recipes and true empowerment (and joy!) in the kitchen.

John Becker and Megan Scott, fourth-generation stewards of the New York Times bestselling Joy of Cooking

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is a wildly informative, new-generation culinary resource. Samin Nosrats wealth of experience comes together here in a pitch-perfect combination of charm, narrative, straight-talk, illustration, and inspiration. Ticking all the boxes for new and seasoned cooks alike, this book meets you wherever you are in the kitchen, in all the right ways.

Heidi Swanson, New York Times bestselling author of Super Natural Cooking

Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

canongate.co.uk

This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books

Copyright Samin Nosrat, 2017

Illustrations Wendy MacNaughton, 2017

The moral right of the author has been asserted

First published in the USA by Simon & Schuster, 1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library

9781782112303
eISBN 9781782112310

Interior design by Alvaro Villanueva

For Alice Waters, who gave me the kitchen, and for Maman, who gave me the world

Anyone who likes to eat, can soon learn to cook well.

Jane Grigson

CONTENTS

PART ONE
The Four Elements of Good Cooking

PART TWO
Recipes and Recommendations

FOREWORD

A s I write these words, this book hasnt even been published yet, but already it feels indispensable.

That must sound over-the-top, I know, but I honestly cant remember the last time I read a book on cooking that was this useful or unusual. I suspect thats 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. Thats 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 wont teach you anything about how to cook, not really. Truth be told, recipes are infantilising: Just do exactly what I say, they say, but dont 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 learnand retain!when a teacher doesnt 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 elementsor 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 timedo all this and you will turn out vibrant and beautiful food, with or without a recipe. Its a big promise, but if you take her coursei.e. read this bookyou 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 teacherexacting, 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 Ive 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.