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The Opening
In August 2021 the city of Da Nang gave its residents forty-eight hours. After that, under the Delta lockdown, nobody would be allowed outside at all: no markets, no street carts, no delivery. Dennis W. Davis, who had spent twenty years as a chef, spent those two days in grocery lines in a 108-degree heat index, then took stock of what was left in an apartment of about 175 square feet. Flour. Eggs. Rice. Fish sauce. A little salt. Every item, he noticed, was ancient, worked out long ago by people who understood no chemistry at all. Salt, Fire, and Guesswork, out today in hardcover from Wanderlight Press Nonfiction, is what came of that inventory. This is not The Wanderer's review, which will come later with its scores. It is an introduction to a book that deserves one.
The Long Read
The argument is in the title, and the Introduction states it on its second page: "They worked it out with three tools: salt, fire, and guesswork." The people who gave us bread and brine, Davis writes, were not trying to build a civilization. They were trying to eat, and the farms, granaries, cities and scribes followed by accident. The book is the first in a series called The Accidental Civilization, and the series has a plain plan: take one ordinary human activity and follow it back through time to see how much of the modern world grew out of it. Eating goes first, he explains, because eating is where everything started.
Ten chapters carry the case, from "The Yeast Incident" to "The Future of Eating," with stops at "The Salt Wars," "The Medieval Banquet Disaster" and "The Globalization of Lunch." The method is the same throughout. A dated scene from Davis's own kitchens or travels opens the chapter, the history runs through the middle, and a scene closes it. The bread chapter goes to Shubayqa 1 in northeastern Jordan, where archaeologists in 2018 found charred crumbs of flatbread about 14,400 years old, at least 4,000 years before anyone in the region is known to have farmed. The salt chapter follows Ibn Battuta across the Sahara in 1352 to Taghaza, a town built on rock salt, and Gandhi on his 24-day march to the sea at Dandi in 1930. Salt, it turns out, has been taxed, monopolized and fought over from Han China to medieval Venice to British India.
The book is best when it takes a story you thought you knew and checks it. Roman soldiers paid in salt, the origin of "salary"? Davis lays out why the evidence is not there. Pepper worth its weight in gold? Using the economic historian John Munro's wage data, he puts a pound of pepper in late-1430s England at roughly two days' wages for a master carpenter: a luxury, but a reachable one. Medieval cooks hiding rotten meat under spices? No evidence, he reports, and the logic runs backwards. He is just as careful about his own claims, labeling a hypothesis as a hypothesis and printing Notes on Sources and a Selected Bibliography at the back.
The spice chapter also contains the book's hardest pages, on the Dutch East India Company's conquest of the Banda Islands for nutmeg. Davis writes them plainly and does not let the reader off. The hunger chapter is as serious: the Irish famine, the Bengal famine of 1943, Vietnam's famine of 1944 and 1945, and the slow climb out through new rice and reform. Its turn on Ireland is the shortest summary of the potato blight I have read, and it is a cook's summary.
Between the history, the personal thread is warm and specific: his own wedding feast in Da Nang in 2019, a Tet holiday around the fire behind his mother-in-law's house, the country ham at a Virginia truck stop that a boy riding along with his trucker father never forgot, a road trip into the Central Highlands where Vietnam grows much of the world's black pepper. Davis is a soft touch about the food and a hard grader about the facts, and the combination works.
Pull Quote
Green, black and white pepper are not different plants. They are different decisions about the same berry.
It is the book in two sentences. Most of what we call nature on the plate is human choice: when to pick, how long to dry, what to add, and who gets to sell it. Salt, Fire, and Guesswork is a history of those decisions, and of how seldom anyone making them knew where they would lead.
Field Notes
On Ireland, Chapter 8 ("The Lean Years," p. 119) opens its account of the blight with a line only a working cook would write: "Every cook knows you do not put the whole dinner in one pot. Ireland had."
The future chapter circles back to the title with a laboratory hamburger presented in London on August 5, 2013, at a cost of around $330,000. One of its first tasters said what it lacked was salt and pepper. Davis says he has never read a better summary of what his book is about.
The hardcover runs 211 pages and is the first of the series. It is available now, and the panel beside this piece has the link.