From Matchsticks to Sealed Jars: Nine Techniques for Building Flavor and Keeping Food

Everything starts with a uniform cut. Julienne strips run about 3 millimeters by 3 millimeters by 40 to 50 millimeters, and trimming the item square first makes every strip cook evenly. The term first appears in print in the 1722 edition of Massialot's Le Cuisinier Royal et Bourgeois.

Diced onion, carrot and celery in a two to one to one ratio, cooked slowly in fat without coloring, form the sweet foundation of French stocks, soups, stews and sauces. Add tomato puree and the result is the darker variation called pincage.

Fond comes from fonds de cuisine, the foundation and working capital of the kitchen. Its original sense is the sauce made by deglazing the browned bits, the sucs, that stick to a pan after cooking, turning what is left behind into stock, broth or sauce.

Roux is typically equal parts flour and fat by weight, stirred over heat until smooth. How far it is cooked decides whether it is white, blond or brown, and it thickens gravies, sauces, soups and stews. Its recorded origin is France.

Steeping soaks a solid in liquid to draw out flavor or soften it. Tea leaves steep in hot water, brewers steep grain, and corn kernels are steeped about 30 to 40 hours at roughly 50 degrees Celsius to loosen the starch. It can also run in reverse to pull excess salt out of a food.

Now the path turns to keeping food. Cured fish is preserved by fermentation, pickling, smoking or a mix of these, often with salt, sugar or nitrates. The oldest form was simple dehydration, and the word cure, from the Latin curare, was first used of fish in 1743.

Home canning packs fruit, vegetables and meat into glass jars and heats them until a vacuum seal forms and the spoilage organisms are killed. Heat-based canning was invented only in the first decade of the 1800s, after thousands of years of storage in vessels and preserving with salt, sugar, vinegar or alcohol.

Named for John Tyndall, this nineteenth century method boils the material for about fifteen minutes on three consecutive days so that spores germinating between heatings are killed in the next round. It is now considered outdated for most uses, though it still serves for sensitive material such as plant seeds.

The path ends with a surprise from the coffee roaster. In torrefacto, sugar is added to the beans during roasting to glaze them and intensify the Maillard reaction. It began in the 1920s as a cheap way of preserving coffee beans and is common in Spain and several Latin American countries.