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Niki Segnit was not a chef but worked in branding and marketing. She wrote this book out of frustration at being able to follow a recipe but never come up with anything of her own, a problem that is, to put it mildly, easy to relate to.
This is how it works: she selected 99 basic flavours and divided them into 16 families, including roasted, earthy, sulphurous, marine, green and floral fruity. The families are arranged in a wheel at the front of the book, with those sitting next to one another generally working well together too. Each individual flavour then gets its own section, and within it an entry for every other flavour it pairs well with.
An example. You have rhubarb at home and do not know what to do with it. You look up rhubarb and find it paired with, among other things, pork, ginger, rose and vanilla. Each combination gets a few hundred words: where it comes from, who has cooked it, how it is usually used and, occasionally, an objection explaining when it does not work. You choose one and cook.
So this is not a recipe book. There are notes on methods but no ingredient lists with quantities, and that is deliberate. The book answers the question of what goes with what, not how many grams you need.
It won the André Simon Award and has become the standard reference for anyone who wants to compose rather than follow. That it is also great fun to browse is a bonus nobody asked for but everyone appreciates.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 400
Language: English
First published: 2010
