by Gareth Groves
This is a fabulous book: original, witty, insightful and useful. Writer Niki Segnit has taken 99 ingredients, divided into 16 sections. You’ll find horseradish and caper under ‘Mustardy’ and cucumber and anise under ‘Green and Grassy’. Segnit then takes these ingedients one by one and cross-references it to the other 98. Opening the book randomly, I find ‘Potato and beetroot’ – nothing to scare the horses, there – do it again and I stumble across ‘Anise and Parsnip’, a rather less obvious combination. The result is over 900 flavour pairings. It is a winning formula.
However, what stops it becoming merely a dry, reference book for food geeks (although the latter will love it) and turns it into something all together more pleasurable is Segnit’s delicious prose.
A lovers’ tiff melts away under a plate of Globe Artichoke and bacon pasta. Anchovy and garlic are recast as Taylor and Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. The basil and egg section is a homage to Dr Suess: “Of the green things that we tested / Basil simply can’t be bested”. I’ll stop now and let you discover the rest for yourselves.
In amongst the humour and anecdotes, you’ll find plenty of robust history and science. Segnit has clearly done her research. Her gift is to present it in a way that informs and educates whilst making you smile and your belly rumble. There are recipes too and where she omits the details of a dish she points you in the direction of where to find it. The likes of Simon Hopkinson, Richard Olney and Fergus Henderson crop up alongside Pellegrino Artusi and M.F.K. Fisher.
There is a bit of wine too. In the globe artichoke section, Segnit notes the vegetable’s reputation as a wine killer, noting “any enemy of wine is an enemy of mine”. Good to hear. Thankfully, she avoids staid, old fashioned food and wine matches – the world has had enough of them. One of my favourite mention of wine comes in the Beef and Liver section where Segnit counsels against taking a Beef Wellington out of the oven before it is cooked:
“Lose your nerve and take it out too soon, and you’ll have soggy pastry and under-cooked beef; exactly what happens to Doris Scheldt in Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, when she makes Beef Wellington for her boyfriend, Charlie Citrine. Charlie’s next girlfriend, Renata, plays it safe and sticks to serving Champagne cocktails while wearing feathers and a G-string. Worth bearing in mind if you are having an off day in the kitchen.”
Wonderful stuff. Buy the book.
The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit is published by Bloomsbury with a cover price of £18.99. I suspect it is available at all good bookshops. The image at the top is taken from the inside cover of the book.
Tags: Book review, books, cookbook, Niki Segnit, The Flavour Thesaurus