Lateral Cooking: Foreword by Yotam Ottolenghi

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Op een vermakelijke manier laat Segnit je zien hoe gerechten ‘werken’ en hoe je zelf kunt gaan experimenteren, bedenken en ontdekken. It will give you the confidence to experiment with flavour, and the variations that follow are a springboard of inspiration to the contents of your fridge and kitchen cupboards. As she explains in her introduction, ‘Marzipan can be nothing more than a mixture of equal weights of ground almonds and sugar with just enough egg white to bring them together. Niki Segnit, author of the landmark book The Flavour Thesaurus, gives you the tools to do just that.

At over 600 pages long, its a brick of a book, with densely packed pages illustrated only by simple red ink line drawings. This book close to fundamentally changed my way of cooking and is still one of the books I regularly use. The recipes in each chapter are arranged on a continuum, passing from one to another with just a tweak or two to the method or ingredients. This is not a recipe book as such (although it does contain recipes) and is organised in a very particular way. There are some fully written recipes with all kinds of great substitutions or variations but most of the book is like an encyclopedia with embedded recipes in food entries.

Whether or not you like the book will depend on how willing you are to go with Segnit’s basic conceit of the cooking continuum, how important you feel it is to understand cooking from that perspective and if you agree that it will turn you into an instinctive cook (if you are not one already) and if that’s what you want to be. Once you've got the hang of flatbreads, for instance, then its neighboring dishes (crackers, soda bread, scones) will involve the easiest and most intuitive adjustments. The result is greater creativity in the Lateral Cooking encourages improvisation, resourcefulness, and, ultimately, the knowledge and confidence to cook by heart. The starting point recipes are designed to be simple, but the idea of the book is not just to master those simple recipes, but to become an all round instinctive cook who understands ingredients and cooking methods so well that you won’t need recipes or cookery books anymore.

Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. Niki Segnit is probably best known as the author of The Flavour Thesaurus, the culinary version of Roget’s Thesaurus, which listed 99 ingredients and suggested flavour matches for each of them.So the faff is not necessarily in the complexity of the recipes, but the amount of reading you will need to do before you get into the kitchen.

Her background is in marketing, specialising in food and drink, and she has worked with many famous brands of confectionary, snacks, baby foods, condiments, dairy products, hard liquors and soft drinks. Lateral Cooking is, in a sense, the ‘method’ companion to its bestselling predecessor, The Flavour Thesaurus – and is just as useful, ingeniously organised and enjoyable to read. So, under 'Bread', we learn that flatbreads, oatcakes, buckwheat noodles, chapattis and tortillas are all variations on one theme. Once you have the hang of each starting point, a wealth of new flavour combinations awaits, each related in Niki's signature combination of culinary science, history, chefs' wisdom and personal anecdote. As the scope of the book is not Eurocentric at all, and is actually very straight forward, I would recommend this as top 3 cookbook for any cook who wants to become better, more educated and inspired in the kitchen.Lateral Cooking is organised into 77 'starting-point' recipes, including plenty of tips for substituting ingredients and reducing the phenomenal variety of world cuisine down to its bare essentials - and then building it back up again. Lateral Cooking offers these formulas, which, once readers are familiar with them, will prove infinitely adaptable. The recipes in each chapter are then arranged on a continuum, the transition from one recipe to another generally amounting to a tweak or two in the method or ingredients.