The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit

This is a really interesting cook book, in the way that it isn’t really a cook book at all. A colleague introduced it to me and I thought it sounded intriguing so I got myself a copy. Incidentally, when I went into Foyle’s to buy the book it was half price, and I even found a copy signed by the author!

The premise of the book is food pairings. There are 99 ingredients split into 16 different categories, such as ‘earthy’, ‘mustardy’ and ‘marine’. Each ingredient is a mini-chapter with a few pages worth of pairings with other ingredients, accompanied with ideas (but not recipes) on how you might make these pairings work. Some of these are as you might expect (horseradish + fish) and there are many contemporary favourites (chocolate + chilli); there are also as many that don’t seem especially obvious (onion + orange).

This isn’t really a cook book as I said; it’s more a sort of start point for some ideas and the writer has deliberately set out to encourage experimentation and go no further. I suppose therefore that it isn’t for everybody, but I really like it and look forward to trying out some of the suggested pairings. It’s beautifully bound and beautifully presented, worth checking out.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Flavour-Thesaurus-Niki-Segnit/dp/0747599777/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1357498365&sr=8-1

Welcome to my new food blog for 2013!

Hello! Welcome to my new food-based project for 2013, a food blog. The plan is to share my thoughts on food and to review as many of my eating-out experiences as possible. I'll also document interesting stuff I have made myself (both good and bad!) and maybe even share a few recipes from time to time.

I've decided to do away with DISH OF THE WEEK for 2013, but instead replace it with SUPER-DISH to highlight my very favourite gastronomic and gluttonous experiences!