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Samin Nosrat ate at Chez Panisse while a student at Berkeley and was so taken with it that she wrote the restaurant a thank-you letter. They replied that she could come and clear tables. Two years later, she was working in the kitchen.
The four elements did not come out of the book but out of teaching. She taught cooking classes for several years and formulated the principles so that she could explain them to people who knew nothing about cooking. One of her students was Michael Pollan, who later wrote about her in Cooked.
The book is divided into two halves, and that is worth knowing in advance. The first consists of four long essays, one on each element, with virtually no recipes at all. The second contains around 100 basic recipes with variations. There is no food photography whatsoever, only Wendy MacNaughton's illustrations, which sounds like a drawback and is precisely the opposite.
The 2018 Netflix series is based on the book, with one episode for each element, filmed in Japan, Italy, Mexico and California. If you have seen it, this is the original, and it goes into considerably greater depth.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 480
Language: English
First published: 2017
The Kitchen Lab Selection
Almost every failed dish can be traced to one of four things. Too little salt, the wrong fat or too little of it, no acid to balance, or the wrong heat at the wrong moment. Nosrat's point is that anyone who can work out which of the four is missing can rescue almost anything without having to look something up.
That is why the book works where recipe collections do not. A recipe teaches you one dish. Four principles teach you to diagnose them all.
She learned them with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse and then spent several years working out how to put them so that someone else could use them. That is considerably harder work than it sounds.
