The Flavor Thesaurus: A Compendium of Pairings, Recipes and Ideas for the Creative Cook [Hardcover]

Niki Segnit (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 9, 2010

Unique, beautifully written and ceaselessly imaginative, The Flavor Thesaurus is a completely new kind of food book—inspired, as author Niki Segnit explains, by her over-reliance on recipes. "Following the instructions in a recipe is like parroting pre-formed sentences from a phrasebook. Forming an understanding of how flavors work together, on the other hand, is like learning the language: it allows you to express yourself freely, to improvise, to cook a dish the way you want to cook it."

The Flavor Thesaurus is the inquisitive cook's guide to acquiring that understanding—to learning the language of flavor.

Breaking the vast universe of ingredients down to 99 essential flavors, Segnit suggests classic and less well-known pairings for each, grouping almost 1,000 entries into flavor families like "Green & Grassy," "Berry & Bush" and "Creamy Fruity." But The Flavor Thesaurus is much more than just a reference book, seasoning the mix of culinary science, culture and expert knowledge with the author's own insights and opinions, all presented in her witty, engaging and highly readable style. As appealing to the novice cook as to the experienced professional, The Flavor Thesaurus will not only immeasurably improve your cooking—it's the sort of book that might keep you up at night reading.

Cooking is an art, like writing or painting, and great cooks are artists. And although the ultimate source of creativity remains elusive, all painters have their color wheel, all writers their vocabulary. And now, in the form of this beautiful, entertaining and exhaustively researched book, cooks have their own collection of essential knowledge: The Flavor Thesaurus.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

The art of combining one food with another to create flavor harmonies has challenged earnest cooks for centuries. A good deal of science underlies this attempt to codify the senses’ reactions, but in the last analysis, flavors either taste good together or they don’t. Segnit, who has made a career creating and marketing new products, has set down what she’s discovered over the decades about which flavors harmonize with one another. She readily acknowledges the general success of such traditional pairings as lamb and mint, asparagus and mushrooms, garlic and basil, cucumber and dill, and bacon and eggs. But she goes on to explore more obscure and unusual combinations including watermelon and chili, horseradish and beets, Parmesan and pineapple, oysters and chicken, and even bacon and chocolate. Any aspiring culinary student will find this an invaluable reference work, and home cooks may find equal inspiration in Segnit’s creative ruminations. --Mark Knoblauch

Review

“To savor The Flavor Thesaurus fully it helps to think of its author, Niki Segnit, as a culinary marriage broker. An imaginative but practical matchmaker, she has a gift for pairing sometimes lackluster ingredients in a way that brings out the best in them and makes them more appealing as a couple than they ever were as loners… She shares an eloquent vocabulary with us in this delicious book.”—Wall Street Journal

“The cure for dinner ennui…a cheekily erudite, endlessly fascinating master list of flavor pairings both familiar and surprising…the entries get you dreaming of both exotic feasts and after-work comfort foods.”—Whole Living

“Erudite and inspiring, practical and fun, it will make you salivate, laugh, take issue and feel vindicated. Your synapses will fire in a whole new way as you trail your hand through your garden herbs … A deceptively simple little masterpiece.”—Sunday Times (UK)

“An exquisite guide to combining flavors.”—Observer (UK)

“An original and inspiring resource.”—Heston Blumenthal

“Intriguing, surprising and remarkably useful.”—Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

“The Flavor Thesaurus: A Compendium of Pairings, Recipes, And Ideas for the Creative Cook by Niki Segnit, will rival The Flavor Bible for pairing info.”—Michael Ruhlman

“For new cooks and old hands in the kitchen, this book is a must-have and a must-read. Not only are the flavor combinations and recipes offered useful, but Niki Segnit’s descriptions of each and every one are delightful to read. It’s a combination between a bedtime read and a kitchen
companion.”—GOOP 

“Any aspiring culinary student will find this an invaluable reference work, and many home cooks may find equal inspiration in Segnit’s creative ruminations.”—Booklist

“Fascinating…a smart new reference for what goes with what, along with pithy explanations for why.”—Denver Post

“[Segnit’s] intuitive approach produces a cozy collection of description, anecdotes, and recipes within the flavor combination entries…Segnit’s intimate style makes the book enjoyable as well as useful. This handy little guide will be a wonderful addition for cooks trying to expand their repertoire.”—Library Journal

“One of the most fascinating food books I’ve come across in a long time.”—Cincinnati Enquirer

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (November 9, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596916044
• ISBN-13: 978-1596916043
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (52 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #23,355 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #73 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Reference

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Fab for Foodies as well as the Culinarily Challenged November 26, 2010

By bookish mom

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book is on my Hannukah Hot List this year. I bought it for my brother in law who is an adventurous cook and ended up buying one for myself and a few others on my list. Love this book for a few reasons - 1) it's an immensely practical source of kitchen inspiration - it's organized around the flavor wheel by simple food pairings. Start by whatever food you have in the house and you will be connected to a range of unexpected flavor partners for it and often some great starting recipes 2) Important to the time-starved and culinarily challenged like myself - many of these ideas are not complicated recipes or even cooked, just food/spice combinations. It gets you back to the intensity and simplicity of good quality ingredients and flavors (if only we had the intensity the basic ingredients like tomatoes and basil that the author must experience in Europe, but Wholefoods or farmers markets are a good start). Some of these flavor pairings will push you out of your palate's comfort zone and are worth trying out of curiosity - eg Juniper and Hard Cheese, Watermelon and Oysters, Lobster in Vanilla Butter etc. You can see why Heston Blumenthal the experimental chef behind egg and bacon ice cream gave this book a rave review. Lastly, it's full of interesting food history and food trivia (eg rhubarb leaves are poisonous, artichokes contain a chemical that inhibits the palate from tasting sweet flavors etc) and I love these kind of books - my other faves include 'Salt' and 'Cod' by Mark Kurlansky and 'Wicked Plants' by Amy Stewart). It doesn't have any pretty pictures or photos, but I think it will be a kitchen staple. Mine's already covered in stains which is a good sign..

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Compulsive reading for all foodies, and the perfect present for keen cooks July 2, 2010

By Third Time Lucky

Format:Hardcover

This book has had stunning reviews in the British national newspapers, and I decided to buy it as a present for my husband, the chef in our household. On the tube home, I had a quick flick through it out of curiosity...and I haven't been able to part with it since.

The concept of `The Flavour Thesaurus' is utterly, utterly genius. Segnit has taken 99 basic flavours (mint, coriander, basil, strawberry etc) and researched 980 pairings of them. The result is part recipe-book, part food memoir, part flavour compendium. (The English Language geek in me feels compelled to point out that `thesaurus' is a misnomer - even similar flavours are NOT synonyms, jeez, though the book retains Roget's format).

Some of these pairings are familiar, such as Bacon & Egg, whilst others (Avocado & Mango, anyone?) are not. Now and then, Segnit provides a recipe; many of these sound incredible, and despite being the most amateur of cooks, I reckon even I could manage many of them. Under Melon & Rose, for example, she merely tells you to drown a cantaloupe melon in rosewater syrup, so that it tastes like "a fruity take on gulab jamun". Can you even read that sentence without wanting to dash to the supermarket for the ingredients?

Segnit also peppers the book with restaurant and dish recommendations - not in an insufferable shiny London lifestyle way, but in an enthusiastic, unpretentious, eating-out-with-your-mates "you really have to try this" way. If only she had supplied phone numbers so we could immediately make reservations.

The real revelation, though, is Segnit's language. Put simply, it's superb.... Modern cookery writing seems to fall into three distinct camps: venomous snob, obsessed with tablecloths and ambience rather than the food itself; faux-geezer dahn the faux-pub; and flirty girl breathlessly enthusing over cake. With `The Flavour Thesaurus', Segnit may well have ended the careers of many of these over-hyped morons.

For a start, her prose is endlessly entertaining. Breezy erudition sits alongside hilarious similes. She is a whizz with description: when she tells you that cloves on their own taste the same as sucking on a rusty nail, you half suspect she conducted a comparative taste test just to be sure. She incorporates references so wide-ranging that both Sybil Kapoor and Velma from Scooby Doo rate a mention. Then there are her unmissable riffs: p 148 instructs us on that "essentially unitary quantity, fishandchips", and insists they must be served in "newsless newspaper" (never polystyrene boxes) and always eaten at a bus stop or "on the wall outside the petrol station". Read about Instinctos and you will be snorting with laughter (and visiting Pizza Hut at the first excuse). I have now read `The Flavour Thesaurus' from cover to cover, and still I have not finished.

I must temper my enthusiasm with a few tiny criticisms just to prove this is a genuine review. At nigh on Ł20 full price in the UK, it's expensive for a book without illustrations or photographs (though note Amazon has since discounted it). It assumes a certain level of prior culinary knowledge, which was sometimes frustrating to a novice like me, though it won't bother those with lots of cookbooks and greater competence in the kitchen. The integration of the recipes into the text - Elizabeth David and Simon Hopkinson style - can be irksome until you've got busy with post-it notes. The index needs further sub-division: `crab', for example, offers 11 entries in the index, but the recipe for crab cakes is easily missed under Butternut Squash & Bacon.

But these are such minor complaints given the enormous appeal of this book. My husband hovers over it constantly, anxious for his promised present. My brother and my best friend have already asked to borrow it. `The Flavour Thesaurus' is truly a classic in the making, and no foodie's bookshelf is going to be complete without it.

EDITED TO ADD, the husband (Latin geek) points out that 'thesaurus' means treasury. Well, whatever language you're using, this book is ACE. Read more ›

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Kitchen Classic: There's no other reference like it. November 19, 2010

By Orpen

Format:Hardcover

The Flavor Thesaurus is just excellent. There's a reason it was nominated alongside Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, Nigel Slater et al for the prestigious Galaxy National Book Awards in the UK: it is classy, original, entertaining and extremely useful.
To be honest, I'm not much of a cook - but my wife is very much so. I read the book and merely find it extremely funny, engaging and entertaining.
For my wife, a trained chef no less, it is a godsend. Open the refrigerator. A couple of leftover ingredients with no time to shop... in minutes we've got something delicious on the table, or at least on the way... or we're out at the local restaurant without the guilt that we could have done something with what we had at home (the book tells you when flavors don't go well together as well as when they do.)
I bought a copy back from the UK after a trip this summer and now have the US version too. I've given it as a gift several times and the recipients love it.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Hit and miss February 18, 2011

By A. Person

Format:Hardcover

I was keen to get my hands on this book as I was fed up with the idea that the hobby cook's role is one of 'follower of recipes'. The primary stated aim of the book was what you might imagine - to examine pairings of certain flavours. An admirable aim tackling a poorly represented segment of the market, and although I feel Ms. Segnit has made a fair start in this area, I'm not convinced she has achieved what she set out to do.

I will start with an example, because I can see from the number of people who have found the non-5-star reviews helpful that there are either a lot of fans of this book (itself worth bearing in mind - mine is only one opinion) or a lot of friends of Segnit. This first example, a full entry (i.e. not a snippet of one), is one that I picked out at random:

'Pea & Oily Fish: According to New England tradition, gardeners make sure to plant their peas by Patriot's Day (19 April), in the hope that they'll be ready for the traditional Independence Day feast of poached salmon, fresh green peas and new potatoes. Strawberry shortcake is served for dessert.'

Now, this is vaguely interesting. It tells me about a culinary tradition in a part of the world I have never visited. What it doesn't tell me is why that combination might be good, how good it is, what kinds of oily fish might go better with peas, what it is about the flavour of peas that might complement, offset, balance, overpower, augment or improve the flavour of the fish, etc. The book is full of this kind of entry.

However, for the sake of balance I would also like to mention that the book does occasionally present some very interesting information on certain ingredients and flavours: their history, what separates them from similar ingredients, etc.... And once in a while you will come across an entry that lives up to the book's stated aim by providing details as to how ingredients combine and complement one another (the Cabbage & Shellfish is one I found at random). The latter are just that little bit too thin on the ground for me to give the book any higher than three stars.

Too often the book strays back into the territory of the cookery book, detracting from the focus on the gap in the market Segnit said needed filled and that inspired her to write the book. Take this full entry as an example (again, at random):

'Chestnut & Pear: Hold back some of the chestnuts you bought for the stuffing at Christmas and serve them on Boxing Day in a salad of chopped pear, the best bits of dark turkey meat and some dark green leaves.'

I agree with the other reviewers who said that the book is cheaply produced, though personally I'm not overly bothered about this (...yet; I might change my mind once it starts falling to pieces in a few months time). A tiny niggle is that the name is ill-considered: a thesaurus provides synonyms, not word combinations, so a flavour thesaurus would in theory provide ingredient alternatives. Anyway, that's taking the review into the realm of pedantry. (EDIT: Have just seen that another reviewer noticed this point about the naming, though I should point out that her husband's comment regarding the etymology is irrelevant, as the meaning in modern-day English is what counts.)

So, to sum up, for me personally it's hit and miss. The scope of the book's aims as set out in the introduction are telling: Segnit has aimed to do too much. She wanted to examine flavour combinations (but had to restrict herself to 99 ingredients), present interesting information and anecdotes, keep it readable rather than purely a reference book and offer recipe ideas (i.e. not 200ml of this, 500g of that, but like the Chestnut & Pear example above). That's far too broad an aim, and to my mind she falls short on all accounts. The result is a book not suited to cover-to-cover reading and not suited to being a consistently reliable reference work (too often you'll look a pairing up and end up thinking 'that doesn't really tell me anything'). More focus would have improved the book considerably.

My view is of course coloured by what I was looking for in the book: an analysis (albeit not scientific) of flavour pairings, on the basis of which I would learn more about why certain ingredients might work together. If this is what you're looking for you might be a little disappointed. If you want a chatty, slightly meandering read for dipping into when on the toilet, in the car or (perhaps) strapped to the wings of a biplane, then this is a quite interesting book. Read more ›