Antonio Tabucchi’s ghostly Lisbon novel Requiem: A Hallucination (1991, translated by Margaret Jull Costa) describes a recipe as ‘a first-class lesson in material culture … someone should have told Herr Jung that food always comes before the imagination.’ There’s a display in the city’s Museu da Agua that shows how much clean water we each use every day. To make three cups of coffee, one glass of milk, one glass of orange juice and one glass of wine requires enough water to fill a hundred bathtubs.