Lateral Cooking: Foreword by Yotam Ottolenghi

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Segnit says that Lateral Cooking is ‘a practical handbook, designed to help creative cooks develop their own recipes’. But as she tested the combinations that informed The Flavor Thesaurus , she detected the basic rubrics that underpinned most recipes. Kind of preferred The Flavour Thesaurus to this one (not a criticism in an way) but as a ginger fiend, took to the ginger loaf like a fish to water (the recipe is delicious). Much as she enjoys haute cuisine, she’s not likely to reproduce it at home, preferring to experiment with recipes from domestic kitchens abroad. Niki Segnit had not so much as peeled a potato until her early twenties, when, almost by accident, she discovered that she loved cooking.

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. The book is divided into twelve chapters covering subjects such as ‘Bread’, ‘Sauces’ or ‘Custard’, and the recipes in each chapter are arranged on a continuum, with the transition from one to the next incorporating only a tweak or two in the method or ingredients. Entertaining, opinionated, and inspirational, with a handsome three-color design, Lateral Cooking will have you torn between donning your apron and settling back in a comfortable chair. Op een vermakelijke manier laat Segnit je zien hoe gerechten ‘werken’ en hoe je zelf kunt gaan experimenteren, bedenken en ontdekken.

Lateral Cooking by Niki Segnit, bestselling author of The Flavour Thesaurus, provides a detailed examination of the key techniques and culinary categories that underpin contemporary cookery. That said, it is a book to inspire serious cooks, particularly those who want to be experimental and step away from the rigid adherence to the recipe. The three spot colours used throughout function like a key, and a clear visual hierarchy helps differentiate between Segnit’s prose, recipe instructions, helpful postscripts and flavour suggestions. Riding on a wave of cookbooks the last decade oriented more towards process, Segnit follows up on her already mind-blowing Flavor Thesaurus with this cornucopia of dishes. 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.

So you might want to try and track down candied melon to make your own Calissons D’aix, a lozenge shaped sweet from Aix-en-Provence made with a marzipan like mix of ground almonds and flavoured with honey, Grand Marnier and orange flower water as well as the aforementioned candied melon. By grouping and linking techniques and outcomes the authors wends their way through a wide array of dishes and presents connections I had not made. Most of the times, you miss one ingredients and need to replace it with something, you are short on time and need to cut a corner etc.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. So, in addition to the flavouring suggestions, each starting point recipe comes with a list of ‘leeway’ bullet points that illustrate the different ways the basic recipe can be prepared and variations in ingredients (and this is before you get on to the more major variations of the flavouring suggestions). The result is greater creativity in the Lateral Cooking encourages improvisation, resourcefulness, and, ultimately, the knowledge and confidence to cook by heart. At over 600 pages long, its a brick of a book, with densely packed pages illustrated only by simple red ink line drawings. So, under 'Bread', we learn that flatbreads, oatcakes, buckwheat noodles, chapattis and tortillas are all variations on one theme.