On Food and Cooking

There are many reasons for wishing that this
revision hadn’t taken as long as it did, and one
of the biggest is the fact that I can’t show
Alan the new chapter on fish. I’ll always be
grateful to Alan and to Jane for their
encouragement and advice, and for the years
of friendship which began with that lunch.
This book and my life would have been much
poorer without them.
I would also have liked to give this book to
Nicholas Kurti — bracing myself for the
discussion to come! Nicholas wrote a
heartwarmingly positive review of the first
edition in Nature, then followed it up with a
Sunday-afternoon visit and an extended
interrogation based on the pages of questions
that he had accumulated as he wrote the
review. Nicholas’s energy, curiosity, and
enthusiasm for good food and the telling
“little experiment” were infectious, and
animated the early Erice workshops. They and
he are much missed.