FIND THE MISSING ELEMENT - Bee Wilson 🌞

Last edited Sat Aug 23, 2025, 12:21 PM - Edit history (2)

FIND THE MISSING ELEMENT

‘What is this art of tasting?’
Jean Conil, Haute Cuisine, 1953

Everyone knows that the secret of good cooking – or a large part of it – is in
the right seasoning. But despite what you may read on the internet, the key
to seasoning is not to be found in a top-secret patented spice blend that will
supposedly give you the wizardry of a top chef. Seasoning is mostly about
noticing. It is about recognising that some foods such as celery are already
salty, while some, such as tomatoes, positively drink salt and others, such as
mushrooms, seem to get most of their seasoning not from salt but from the
heat of a pan.

Seasoning is not just about learning how to add things but also about
learning how to hold yourself back from adding things. It is about
responding to the food in front of you and bringing it into balance with your
own taste. ‘Vote early and vote often’ is the old joke made about corrupt
elections. The same is true of seasoning. Early salting tastes different from
late salting. I taste food constantly during the cooking process, the only
proviso being that I don’t taste raw meat. There is a depth of flavour that
you get from confident early salting which can never fully be recovered later
on, particularly when cooking something such as pasta. An unseasoned pot
of pasta can never be made salty enough at the end. But you should also
continue to taste and season as you go along. Never forget to test the
seasoning right at the end, just before you eat.

Seasoning does not even have to mean adding salt. This chapter is about
three simple tricks to improve your seasoning game that have nothing to do
with salt. The tricks are lemon, crunch and water. The word ‘season’ comes
from the Old French saisonnier, meaning to render something palatable by
the influence of the seasons or to ripen fruit. When we season food what we
are trying to do is bring the flavours into the same state of fullness and balance
that ripe fruit has all by itself. Seasoning might mean adding sweetness or
sharpness instead of salt or it might mean adding nothing at all if you feel
that a certain ingredient tastes fabulous just as it is.

From "The Art of Cooking"
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77264998-the-secret-of-cooking

THIS NEEDS LEMON



‘Sourness brings contrast, balance, variety, zing –
pleasure.’ Mark Diacono,

Sour

If you feel your cooking lacks zing, there is a very simple solution that will
make everything you cook taste instantly more delicious. No matter what
you are cooking, right at the end, when you are happy that the salt levels are
right but you still feel it could be a touch more exciting, add a little lemon
juice, starting with a teaspoonful and working up from there. If you still feel
it lacks something, add some of the lemon’s zest too, which will enhance
the sour effect of the juice in an upliftingly perfumed way. That’s it. That’s
the whole tip. Apologies if it seems crashingly obvious, but I am frequently
surprised to meet people who don’t know that you can season food with
lemon as well as salt. Instead of salt and pepper, we should talk of salt and
lemon as the two universal seasonings. Obviously there are dozens of other
flavourings you might want to add in addition to the salt and lemon, from
fresh tarragon to ras el hanout. But salt and lemon (or some other form of
acid such as vinegar) provide the basic structure: a sturdy coathanger on
which to hang any outfit that takes your fancy.

What of pepper? Years of cooking for children who recoil at the bite of
anything hot has convinced me that it’s better for all kinds of reasons to
keep the pepper grinder on the table along with a dish of chilli flakes rather
than in the kitchen. Personally, I adore the pungency and perfume of
coarsely ground black pepper, a pungency that actually helps digestion
because the active ingredient in pepper – piperine – encourages saliva and
gastric juices to flow. But I feel that black pepper is a flavouring so heady
and particular that it should be saved for those occasions where its heat and
perfume can really make an impact, such as on soft-boiled eggs or over a
plate of spaghetti carbonara. I love black pepper too much to follow the
convention of adding it thoughtlessly to every single dish. When you season
with pepper, the food ends up tasting of pepper, which drowns out whatever
flavourings you were intending the food to taste of. When you season with salt
and lemon, assuming you are not heavy-handed, the food ends up tasting more
fully of itself.

The need to season with acid as well as salt is something that I suspect
many of us know instinctively, even if we do not do it consciously. When I
started reading cookbooks and recipe columns as a child in the early 1980s,
a small detail started to bug me. No matter what the dish, British recipe
writers would suggest serving it ‘with a green salad’ or sometimes, ‘with a
green salad and some crusty bread’. What was the purpose of all these
green leaves? I love salad as much as the next person. Apart from tasting
and looking fresh, a simple salad is a quick way to get vitamins and fibre on
the table without needing to cook any vegetables. But is an automatic green
salad really called for with every single meal?
It was only much later, after reading Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin
Nosrat, that I developed a theory about this whole ‘serve with a green salad’
business. Nosrat made me see for the first time what a truly essential
element acidity is in all cooking, in bringing flavours into focus and giving
a jolt of much-needed brightness to rich or heavy or starchy ingredients. To
Nosrat, a plate of food without acidity is a plate of food with something
missing: like pasta that has been cooked in unsalted water. She has talked
about the fact that cranberry sauce is a crucial element in the traditional
Thanksgiving meal because without it, there would be nothing acidic on the
table to offset the richness of the turkey and gravy and mashed potatoes and
stuffing.

‘Serve with a green salad’ is another way of saying this recipe will be a
bit bland unless you have something sharp and tangy alongside. ‘Serve with
crusty bread’ is saying the same thing but about texture: it’s like an
admission that a given recipe lacks crunch (a subject I will return to in a
moment). The default instruction to ‘serve with a green salad’ comes from a
hidden instinct on the part of the recipe writers that, as written, their recipes
lack the final touch of zinginess that most eaters crave. The reason for the
salad – other than imbuing dinner with overtones of healthiness – is to bring
the tang of vinaigrette to season the rest of the meal. The instruction would
be redundant in a food culture such as India’s, where tangy bowls of pickle
or chutney or fresh relishes are incorporated into every meal. Nothing is quite
as powerful in correcting the seasoning of a dish as a small late squeeze of
lemon just before you serve it. It needs to be added late because unlike salt,
sharp flavours lose their potency if you cook them too much. This is as true
of risotto or a platter of roasted vegetables as it is of a rich meaty casserole
or fish and chips. Samin Nosrat calls this final squeeze of lemon a ‘garnishing
acid’ and notes that while ‘no amount of salt at the table will make up for
underseasoning food from within, a hit of acid at the very last second often
improves food’. The only time that lemon may not add much is when you are
cooking something that is already heavily sour, such as a Filipino chicken
adobo cooked in vinegar or anything containing a lot of tomatoes, which are
already acidic. (Ed. note: Mustard also falls into this category, because of its
vinegar.)

Salt at the start, lemon and herbs at the end. You won’t go far wrong
with these two rules of seasoning, except that sometimes, you might want to
use lime or vinegar instead of the lemon and sometimes you want a little
extra salt at the end too. To me, a squeeze of lemon is like a squeeze of
sunshine on the plate. It makes me feel more alive. When I visited China a
couple of years ago, I felt at home when I realised that there was vinegar on
the table in every restaurant and I knew I was among eaters who prized
sourness as much as I do.

Imagine how different cooking must have been in Europe before citrus
fruit became commonplace. If you look at British cookbooks from
Renaissance times, they make heavy use of verjuice (a highly acidic grape
juice) and of barberries (tiny sharp berries which are still popular in the
cooking of the Middle East). This shows that the thirst for sourness was a
human constant, even before the lemon entered our lives.
As a good rule of thumb, when a recipe tells you to ‘check your
seasoning’ at the end, assume that this means ‘check your acid’ as well as
‘check your salt’. When you feel that your seasoning is a bit off, you have
options. The most obvious move is to add more salt, but go easy at this final
stage because while salty food tastes of life, oversalted food is deadening.
Sometimes, the answer is fat. A final spoonful of good olive oil or a
generous slice of unsalted butter can work wonders in rounding flavours out
and marrying them up with each other. Occasionally, the answer may be
sugar – just half a teaspoon to take the bite out of a tomato sauce, for
example. Depending on your palate, the food may also be calling out for the
bite of pepper or chilli but as I’ll explain in more detail later on in the
section on cooking for children, I feel that seasoning with
heat is a personal affair, often best left to the eater on the plate than the cook
in the kitchen.

Of all the basic tastes – sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami – sourness is
the most overlooked and, I would argue, the most important secret weapon
in a cook’s arsenal. Good cooks have always known this. In What Mrs
Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, the first cookbook by an
African-American cook, published in 1881, Abby Fisher recommends
basting broiled venison with currant jelly ‘should you like your venison tart
or a little acid’. Mrs Fisher also has a recipe for something she calls ‘meat
dressing’ which she adds to all her meat entrées and soups. It’s a kind of
sour seasoning made from grated carrot, onion and cauliflower boiled with
vinegar and brown sugar and then strained and cooked some more. She says
that it’s nice to add a tablespoon of this to every quart of stew. By the same
token, I quite often add just a teaspoon of vinegar to a stew or soup at the
very end but as Mark Diacono remarks in his wonderful book Sour, less is
more. ‘A thimble of vinegar’ will transform a plain leek and potato soup
‘into a delight’ but if you are too bold with the vinegar you end up with
‘leek and potato and vinegar soup’, which probably isn’t what you wanted.

Other than lemon, there are many ways to add a final hit of sourness to a
dish. Tamarind or pomegranate molasses are good if you want some dark
characterful sweetness along with the sour hit. Sour powders such as
amchur (dried mango powder) and sumac (a tangy red spice used a lot in
Arab cuisine) can give a bracing lift to salads and meze. A dash of rice
vinegar lends a soft and unobtrusive acidity and it’s what I turn to on those
sad occasions when there are no lemons in the house. Another source of
gentle sourness is yoghurt (and other fermented dairy such as kefir or sour
cream). My most regular condiment is a bowl of thick yoghurt seasoned
quite highly with salt and whisked together with half a grated clove of
garlic. Sometimes, I sprinkle either nigella seeds or a dusting of sumac or
paprika over it. I am happy to eat this yoghurt sauce with almost any meal. I
prefer it to ketchup for dipping fries. I am paranoid about serving a meal
that is too dry, and a bowl of this on the table ensures that even a slightly
overcooked chicken breast is luscious again. It’s incredibly good drizzled
with my other favourite condiment, the crispy chilli oil that you can buy
from Chinese supermarkets. The red chilli oil marbles in patterns.
But when it comes to souring agents, nothing has quite the versatility or
impact of a simple squeeze of lemon. In their book The Art of Flavour, Daniel
Patterson and Mandy Aftel explain why lemon is so good at making
food taste more balanced. Patterson and Aftel note that in contrast to the
‘piercing acidity’ of some wine vinegars, citrus juice contains sweetness as
well as sourness and its brightness has the power to ‘knit other flavours
together’.

With lemon, as with anything, it’s possible to have too much of a good
thing. Patterson and Aftel note that while a little lemon or lime can
punctuate a salad, too much can overwhelm it and ‘diminish the savoury
qualities you have worked so hard to build’. Unless you are making
lemonade, the juice of half a lemon is often better than the juice of a whole
lemon. Acidity dials down umami, so you don’t want to add so much to a
dish that you dilute the overall flavour.
You know you have got the amount of ‘garnishing acid’ right when you
taste something and instead of thinking: ‘This tastes lemony,’ you simply
think: ‘This doesn’t need anything more.

From "The Art of Cooking"
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77264998-the-secret-of-cooking

Love Bee Wilson!