Lateral Cooking
Foreword by Yotam Ottolenghi
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- £16.99
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- £16.99
Publisher Description
'You could cook from it over a whole lifetime, and still be learning' Nigella Lawson
'A rigorous, nuts-and-bolts bible of a book' Jay Rayner, Observer
'Lateral Cooking...uncovers the very syntax of cookery' Yotam Ottolenghi
'Astonishing and totally addictive' Brian Eno
The groundbreaking book that reveals the principles underpinning all recipe creation, from the author of the bestselling The Flavour Thesaurus
Do you feel you that you follow recipes slavishly without understanding how they actually work? Would you like to feel freer to adapt, to experiment, to play with flavours?
Niki Segnit, author of the landmark book The Flavour Thesaurus, gives you the tools to do just that. Lateral Cooking is organised into 77 'starting-point' recipes, including plenty of tips for substituting ingredients and reducing the phenomenal variety of world cuisine down to its bare essentials – and then building it back up again.
So, under 'Bread', we learn that flatbreads, oatcakes, buckwheat noodles, chapattis and tortillas are all variations on one theme. A few simple tweaks and you can make soda bread, scones or cobbler. And so on, through breads and batters, broths, stews and dals, one dish leading to another.
Lateral Cooking is as inspirational and entertaining a read as it is a practical guide. Once you have the hang of each starting point, a wealth of new flavour combinations awaits, each related in Niki's signature combination of culinary science, history, chefs' wisdom and personal anecdote. You will realise that recipes that you had thought were outside of your experience are reassuringly similar to things you've made a dozen times before. It will give you the confidence to experiment with flavour, and the variations that follow are a springboard of inspiration to the contents of your fridge and kitchen cupboards. You will, in short, learn to cook 'by heart'– and that's where the fun really begins.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
U.K. food writer Segnit (The Flavor Thesaurus) brings a vast breadth of knowledge to this massive and quietly playful exploration of the art and science of cooking. In what is as much a personal culinary history as it is a reference, Segnit is as likely to recall dining on tapas along the Camino de Santiago in Spain as she is to cite one of the hundreds of cookbooks she draws on for source material or to discuss the role of clam chowder in Moby Dick. Her mission is to present intuitive cooking as a learnable skill, one that can be developed through an understanding of how certain foods relate to each other in terms of how they are prepared. Learning to master a basic flatbread is the starting point for a panoply of connected dishes along a continuum that proceeds from crackers and soda bread to buns and brioche. A dozen such culinary trails are uncovered in categories that include sauces, chocolate, roux, and nuts, where, for example, marzipan easily transforms into macaroons. Home cooks can tinker with the many "flavors & variations" provided for each dish, or experiment with ingredients by taking heed of "leeway" options that suggest, for example, doubling the molasses and halving the sugar for an extra-sticky loaf of gingerbread. This extraordinary cookbook provides a treasure map full of both straightforward satisfactions and rewarding detours.
