MY LIGHT BULB MOMENT
Cookbook pioneer Niki Segnit
When niki Segnit, 49, published The Flavour Thesaurus in 2010, it was the first cooking reference book of its kind — an indispensable guide to flavour pairings. She lives in London with her husband nat, a writer, and twins, aged four.
I NEVER set out to be a food writer, although I grew up in a household of home cooking.
After school I went into the advertising industry, where I worked for 15 years on food and drink brands. I hadn’t so much as peeled a potato until my early 20s, when, almost by accident, I discovered I loved cooking.
As part of my job, I was doing product development going to what they call ‘sensory testings’. One of the tests I went to was on banana milkshakes. I discovered they all taste different — one might be spicy, another would have a strong vanilla note. I was having my mind opened up to flavours.
Then one night I was watching MasterChef and saw someone put blueberries and butternut squash together — and that was the trigger. I wanted to buy a book about what flavours went together and why. But there wasn’t one. So I decided to write one. The organising principle of the book is a ‘flavour wheel’ that divides ingredients into food themes: floral, fruity, roasted, meaty, earthy.
I took 99 popular ingredients (from potato to pineapple) and explained why pairings worked.
I cooked hundreds of recipes as research, tweaking them to be sure about each flavour pairing.
It is difficult to describe flavour, so I looked for fun ways to do so. For example, I wrote that coriander and lime are like ‘the wooh woohs’ in the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy For The Devil — indispensable!
And now eight years later I’ve written a new reference book, Lateral Cooking, inspired by my grandmother who made delicious meals without recipe books or scales. The book has basic elastic recipes that you can apply flavours to and it is written kit-style: you learn the starting point of a recipe, how to adapt it and ultimately how to cook it without a recipe.
I used to be a bit of a stiff Stepford cook. I never thought I’d be freewheeling in the kitchen, but it turns out you can learn to be intuitive. You’ll be surprised how rarely things go seriously wrong.
LATERAL Cooking by niki Segnit (Bloomsbury, £35)