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This book is a trip! Explore a world of flavour combinations with The Flavour Thesaurus A pure joy for an adventurous cook with a love for exploration. You don’t need to be highly skilled in the kitchen to make use of this book though. All you need is an open mind and a desire to push your boundaries a little.
As the author Niki Segnit points out in her introduction, most of us begin with cookbooks or online recipes. Then we develop the skills to complete these successfully. Eventually, we even progress onto more complex recipes but always with the crutch of that reassuring recipe with lists of comforting ingredients.
‘Had I ever really learned to cook? Or was I just reasonably adept at following instructions?’
Niki recalls a dinner party where she was served a dish with a combination of flavours she was surprised by.
‘How, I wondered, did she know that was going to work?’
This took place around the time Heston Blumenthal and Ferran Adria were coming to prominence. She became fascinated with their deeper understanding of the links between flavours. It was in this environment that Niki started to collate The Flavour Thesaurus. She examined their commonalities and differences in the new light of these adventurous chefs. That journey led to this beautifully conceived and written book.
The book splits flavours into 16 broad groups, such as ‘Meaty’, ‘Green and Grassy’ and ‘Citrussy’. The book places 99 different foods on a wheel for easy reference. It doesn’t aim to provide a comprehensive list of ingredients and flavours, but it certainly covers enough of the spectrum to ignite your culinary creativity during many cooking sessions Years worth, in fact.
The Flavour Thesaurus then proceeds to list each of these ingredients and to match them with flavour suggestions from across the wheel. Now don’t expect pictures of these recipes, there are none, not a one! Usually this is a problem for me but this book is different. It’s more about the imagination and expansion of the breadth of your culinary confidence than it is about individual recipes.
The author presents some combinations with brief recipes, stories, or explanations of ideas, all infused with beauty and humour. The absence of precise instructions becomes irrelevant as your mind embraces new thoughts. After all, Google is a massive place and you’re sure to find recipes for most flavour combos listed here but with this book, your need for those recipes will begin to disappear as your imagination is fired.
Entries like this for example:
‘Banana & Almond – A banana split without a sprinkling of toasted almond flakes? Like a Bee Gee in a buttoned up shirt’
Or the more practical:
‘Tomato & Lemon – A light squeeze of lemon will remove the metallic taste from a tin of tomatoes. Worth knowing, especially if you’ve just retrieved a tin from the depths of the cupboard, as the tinned flavour develops with age’
And the more unexpected:
‘Watermelon & Chilli’ – A favourite combination in Mexican confectionery. Watermelon lollies come with a chilli sherbet for dipping, watermelon gummy sweets with a sugar and chilli coating’
(Stew Eats note: I used this combination in a summer salad along with lime, salt and coriander – tremendously good!)
Don’t worry about how to use this book. When you first get it you’ll hold it in your hands and admire it, it really is a beautiful object in and of itself. Then you’ll flick through it spotting both familiar combinations as well as ones that make you chuckle. Then you’ll waste the rest of your day reading page after page of lovely, flowing writing and idea filled flights of fancy.
You’ll not be limited to the page either. If you’re anything like me you’ll begin immediately to place these new ideas into recipes you cook, or will soon cook. While some of these ideas might seem mad that’s half the fun. On the other side of the looking glass you will end up with some tiny additions to your cooking that make a big difference and some whole new thought processes that lead to dishes you’ve never even heard of, let alone thought of making.
This book was one of the major steps for me on my journey from serviceable recipe follower to someone with the confidence to create dishes and wow guests with flavours and food combinations they never knew they’d love.
I don’t use this book as often as some of my plain recipe books but it’s certainly had more influence than most of those. Instead, I dip in to check an idea I’ve had or sometimes just to get my head into that free flow creative place when I’m coming up with or refining ideas. I frequently use the flavour wheel from this book, and I consider it the best quick reference guide in my collection.
This book really is a work of mind freeing genius. Explore flavour combinations with an empowered, open mind in the way that Segnit does here. Niki has unlocked a path to culinary adventure that took me to a different level.
Yes there are recipes to try and yes there are delicious combinations to use. Yes it’s an immensely enjoyably readable book that will make you smile.
But more than that, if you want to move from a recipe follower to a dish creator then this is a must have book in your collection. Pure joy!