Sakshi

In the attics of Modena, where the winter freezes and the August air shimmers, families keep a batteria — a descending row of barrels in oak, chestnut, cherry, mulberry and ash. Each autumn, cooked grape must goes into the largest. Each year a little is drawn from the smallest, and every barrel is topped up from the one above it. Nothing is ever emptied. The vinegar in the last cask carries a trace of every harvest before it.

The first written record dates to 1046, when a barrel was sent from Canossa to the Holy Roman Emperor. Balsamico means balm: it began life as medicine, prescribed for sore throats, for childbirth, for plague. For centuries a family's barrels travelled with a daughter when she married — a dowry you could taste.

Before refrigeration, southern Italy had one preservative it never ran short of: the sun. Through August, in Puglia and Calabria and Sicily, tomatoes are split, salted and laid out on wooden racks and terracotta rooftops. For a week or more they are carried in at dusk and out again at dawn, turned by hand, watched for rain. What goes up is ninety-five per cent water. What comes down is almost none.

This is cucina povera — the cooking of people who had nothing, which turns out to be some of the best cooking in the world. Drying does not only remove water; it concentrates glutamates, the same molecules that make parmesan and anchovy and soy sauce taste the way they do.

Ponti has been preserving things in Piedmont since 1787: eight generations, one family, Italy's oldest vinegar house.

A jalapeño is a problem. It has thick, wet walls, and left in the sun it rots long before it dehydrates. So somewhere in central Mexico — before the Aztecs, possibly as far back as Teotihuacán — someone dug a pit, built a smouldering fire of pecan and fruitwood, and left the chillies over it for days.

The Nahuatl word is chīlpoctli: chilli, smoked. Ten kilos of fresh jalapeño become one kilo of chipotle. What is lost in water is gained in smoke, and the smoke does not sit on the surface — it goes all the way through.

The Spanish added the adobo: tomato, vinegar, garlic, oregano. Pre-Columbian fire married to colonial acid is one of the great accidents of the kitchen.

Soybeans, salt, and a mould called kōji — Aspergillus oryzae, which Japan formally declared its national fungus in 2006. The kōji is grown on rice, mixed with cooked soybeans and salt, packed into cedar vats, weighted with stones, and left alone.

Aka means red, and it is red because it has been left the longest: one to three years, with more soybean and less rice than its pale cousin. Time does what heat cannot. The sugars and amino acids brown slowly, in the dark, and what emerges is darker, saltier and considerably more serious than white miso.

Miso arrived from the Asian mainland with Buddhism in the seventh century. By the medieval period it was valuable enough that samurai were paid partly in it, and the warlord Date Masamune built a dedicated miso works to keep his armies fed and upright on campaign.

In the 1910s a pharmacist in Kumamoto named Suekichi Yoshimaru was worrying about calcium. Japan was short of it, and children especially. His solution was to grind fish bones to a powder and mix them with sesame, poppy seed and nori, so it could be sprinkled over the one thing every Japanese child ate every day: a bowl of white rice.

He called it Gohan no Tomo — Friend of Rice. The name that stuck was furikake, from 振りかける: to sprinkle over.

It went to war as a military ration, came home in the lunchboxes of the 1950s and never left. There are now hundreds of varieties sold in shakers with cartoon characters on them, and an entire generation of Japanese adults for whom toasted sesame and nori is simply the smell of being eight years old.

Wasabia japonica does not grow in soil. It grows in gravel, in the beds of cold mountain streams, in water that must stay between eight and eighteen degrees and must never stop moving. Around 1600, in the Utogi valley of Shizuoka, farmers worked out how to terrace a hillside so that a spring ran through it. The method has barely changed in four hundred years.

The story goes that the villagers of Utogi presented it to Tokugawa Ieyasu, who liked it enough — and noticed that the leaf resembled his family's hollyhock crest — that he restricted its cultivation to the region.

One rhizome takes eighteen months to two years. It is grated in a slow circle on oroshigane, traditionally sharkskin, and the heat is not present until you grate it: rupturing the cells releases an enzyme that builds the pungency from scratch. Fifteen minutes later it has gone.

Glutinous rice, steamed and fermented, then worked into a solid mash with wheat bran and turned by hand every day for twenty days in open vats while wild bacteria do the rest. Then it is aged. Zhenjiang has been doing this since roughly the sixth century.

There is a legend the Chinese tell about the invention of vinegar. Heita, son of Du Kang who invented wine, left a batch of spent mash too long. On the twenty-first day, at the hour of yǒu — late afternoon — he opened it and found something extraordinary. And so the character for vinegar, 醋, is built from 酉, the vessel and the hour, beside the strokes for twenty-one days.

Zhenjiang is one of China's Four Great Vinegars, and the one they say this of: 越陈越香 — the longer it is kept, the more fragrant it becomes.

Za'atar is two things with one name. It is a plant — Origanum syriacum, wild Levantine hyssop, which grows on limestone hillsides and smells like oregano crossed with thyme and something greener than either. And it is the blend made from it: the dried herb, toasted sesame, salt, and sumac.

Sumac is the other half of the story: the dried, crushed berries of Rhus coriaria, deep ruby and startlingly sour. Before lemons were common in the Levant, sumac was how you made food taste bright.

At dawn across Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Jordan, village bakeries open and the first thing out of the oven is man'oushe — flatbread spread with za'atar loosened in olive oil, baked until the edges blister. It is breakfast, and it is what you eat walking to work.

Dried red chillies soaked soft, galangal, lemongrass, kaffir lime zest, coriander root, white peppercorn, shallot, garlic and shrimp paste — pounded, in that order, in a granite mortar called a khrok. Hardest and driest first, softest and wettest last. It takes twenty minutes of real work, and the sound of it at dawn is the sound of a Thai kitchen.

Here is a thing worth knowing: Thailand had no chillies at all until the sixteenth century, when Portuguese traders brought them from the Americas. Before that, the heat in Thai food came from white peppercorn — which is why peppercorn is still in the paste, doing a job nobody remembers assigning it. Thai food as we know it is about five hundred years old, and it swallowed the chilli whole.

Blue Elephant was founded in Brussels in 1980 by Nooror Somany Steppe and her husband Karl, and its Bangkok cooking school has spent forty years teaching people to do this properly.

A truffle is a fungus that has given up on the surface. It fruits entirely underground, in symbiosis with the roots of oak, hazel and poplar, and because it can never release spores into the air it evolved a different strategy: it smells so overwhelming that animals dig it up, eat it, and carry it away. One of the compounds it produces is chemically close to a boar pheromone. The truffle is not trying to seduce you. You are simply downstream of something else.

In the Langhe hills of Piedmont the trifolau go out at night with a Lagotto Romagnolo — dogs replaced pigs, because pigs ate the evidence. Truffles cannot be reliably farmed. Every one is found rather than grown, and the best whites from Alba have gone at auction for the price of a car.

Brillat-Savarin called them the diamond of the kitchen, which is either a compliment about rarity or an observation that they are lumps of dirt people lose their minds over. Probably both.