Back in the day, when I knew no better, I had a cookbook addiction. My shelves groaned under the weight of glossy food porn, each new fad lovingly and self-consciously represented at great and ostentatious expense. I was especially fond of cheffy books: the Roux brothers, Anton Mosimann, Alastair Little, Shaun Hill, Jean-Christophe Novelli, Marco Pierre White, Pierre Koffman, and so on and so fifth. (This was before the revolutionary days of the River Cafe and their authentic, yet somehow staggeringly expensive take on Italian peasant cooking). I pored over them, taking in their wisdom, fondly imagining that one day I would actually cook sumptuous dishes like “lapereau farci au foie gras, aux artichauts et truffe” instead of the more mundane concoctions that actually represented my daily fare, for example the searingly honest and earthy “tranche de toast avec beurre salé, coulis de marmelade d’orange Coopers”.
Funny how everything sounds more glamorous in French.
Hardly a month went by without the latest celebrity chef launching their own book, each more glamorous and expensive than the last, and each, truth be told, reproducing very similar cooking with subtle variations to trap the susceptible (that’ll be me). Then, sometime in the 1990s, there was a revolution. It was a mild revolution, a bit like the decision one occasionally makes to keep one’s socks in the left-hand drawer instead of the middle one, but it was a revolution nonetheless.
Until then, most of the chef cookbooks that I had seen had clearly been written from the point of view of someone who did all their cooking in a professional kitchen. To this day, when I see the words ‘preparation time: fifteen minutes’ followed by a list as long as your arm of ingredients that need peeling, chopping, whipping, shelling, slicing, dicing, or sometimes chasing around the kitchen with a net and a cleaver, alarm bells ring in my head like the triangle part in the last movement of Dvorak’s Cello Concerto. Fifteen minutes. Yeah, right. It takes me that long to peel a clove of garlic.
These books were also beautifully illustrated, the perfection of the presentation merely underlining the impossibility of the task before you. It was as if the chefs were taunting your inadequacy. “See that?” went the subtext, “you’ll never be able to do that, you won’t. That’ll be thirty-five pounds, please.”
But in the 90s there emerged a refreshing strain of books, written by accomplished, and sometimes prominent chefs who had actually spent a fair proportion of their time in domestic kitchens, and who encompassed in their writing an innate understanding of everything that that entailed. Ovens with dodgy thermostats; imprecise measurements; unavailability of key ingredients; tendency to slosh in just that little bit more wine/oil/cream than the recipe prescribes. These impediments, and many more, are familiar to the domestic cook, and these new writers, while bringing to the table, as it were, their immense professional knowledge and experience, also understood that most people don’t actually want to reproduce restaurant food in our own homes. That, after all, is why we go to restaurants.
In addition, these chefs-turned-writers could actually write. The leader of this pack, for me, was (and is) Simon Hopkinson. He was chef-proprietor of Bibendum in South Kensington in its absolute heyday, before turning his hand to full-time food writing. I still miss his magnificent column in The Independent. What Hoppers did in his first book, the incomparable Roast Chicken & Other Stories, was very simple. He chose some of his favourite main ingredients, and he wrote about them, taking care to include, for each one, several contrasting recipes, all carefully designed to show off the featured ingredient to fabulous advantage. He didn’t show off, he didn’t blind you with science, and, touchingly, he included fanfares to other cooks and writers by whom he had been particularly influenced. The book exudes love of cooking, eating and the written word in equal measure, and remains very near the top of my Desert Island Cookbook collection some fifteen years later.
Others, of course, have joined it, including several by The Country’s Favourite Nigel, whose latest offering, Tender, Volume Two, I was lucky enough to be given for Christmas.
Now, I yield to nobody in my admiration for Mr. Slater. In the Runny household, his word is law. If Nige says there is good to be found in swede, I put forty-five years of bitter and contradictory experience to the back of my mind, and give it a try. When he extols the virtues of kale, I swallow manfully and do his bidding. Dammit, the man’s a legend - his books are stuffed full of common sense and knowledge, and he writes like an angel. Furthermore, and possibly most importantly, you get the overwhelming impression that about once a month he thinks ‘bollocks to it’ and makes himself a fish finger sandwich with ketchup and mayo on Kingsmill medium white sliced, followed by a family-sized Galaxy. This is how I want my food heroes - underneath it all, just as slutty and greedy as the rest of us.
But, much as I love Nigel, and look forward to discovering the joys of his latest offering, my heart this Christmas was stolen by an outsider, something quite unexpected and original. It is called The Flavour Thesaurus, it is written by someone I had never heard of, and I think you should buy it.
Niki Segnit is, as far as I can tell, neither professional chef nor food writer. But she clearly loves, and knows a lot about, food. And she has found a way of writing a book about food that is refreshingly original, and does something not, as far as I know, attempted before.
Which, of course, is what original means, so do me a favour and ignore the last part of the previous sentence. I can’t be bothered to delete it.
The Flavour Thesaurus does what it says on the tin. Using as her basis an alluring flavour wheel (like a colour wheel, but, well, with flavours instead of colours), Segnit explores the possibilities presented by the pairings of 99 ingredients, which come under a broader umbrella of 16 categories: ‘roasted’, for example, or ‘green & grassy’. She does this in what I would call a selectively exhaustive manner, eschewing some of the more outlandish combinations that would arise from an absolutely rigorous adherence to the principle, but offering a mini-essay on every pairing deemed worthy of inclusion. Blackcurrant and mushroom, for example, doesn’t make the cut, but cauliflower and chocolate does, with a brief description of Heston Blumenthal’s (who else?) cauliflower and chocolate risotto.
By avoiding the ‘everything has to be presented in recipe form’ option, she has liberated both herself and her reader. Entries include historical detail, pithy comment, a snippet or two of fascinating information, outspoken personal opinion, and plenty of dry wit. Cuisines from all over the world are referenced, as are, gratifyingly, many films and TV shows, as well as other writers, from Homer (the Greek one, not the Simpson) to Jamie Oliver, via the OED.
Sometimes, when the fancy takes her, she includes a compressed recipe; more often, she doesn’t. The brevity of the entries encourages the reader to dip in and out of the book, although I’ve found it so interesting that I’ve been reading it from cover to cover, and every page is an encouragement to explore, to experiment, to cast aside the foul tyranny of recipe culture that has held us in its thrall for so many years and trust the instinct of one’s own taste buds.
The result is an absolute joy. Her writing is pithy (have I said that already? How unpithy of me), drily informative without being tedious or lecturing, and possessed of an economical wit. Here she is, for example, on a horseradish and bacon sandwich: “Sink your teeth in and feel your eyeballs begin to turn upwards. Note how the horseradish gets behind the bacon and gives it a nip on the backside.” And on the combination of walnut and parsnip: “Like gnawing on Pinocchio’s leg.”
There is more in this 400-page book than you will find in dozens of other, more heavily promoted, tomes.
Even better, there isn’t a single photo in it. I feel adequate again.