Lateral Cooking: Foreword by Yotam Ottolenghi

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Each chapter opens with an illustrated double page spread which introduces the reader to that chapter’s recipes. It’s a genius way of helping people develop an instinct for what differentiates two very similar dishes on a spectrum and hence know how they can push and experiment with it. The result is greater creativity in the Lateral Cooking encourages improvisation, resourcefulness, and, ultimately, the knowledge and confidence to cook by heart. The starting point recipes are designed to be simple, but the idea of the book is not just to master those simple recipes, but to become an all round instinctive cook who understands ingredients and cooking methods so well that you won’t need recipes or cookery books anymore.

After working through this book, even just some of it, you will never read and use another cookbook the same way. Niki Segnit is probably best known as the author of The Flavour Thesaurus, the culinary version of Roget’s Thesaurus, which listed 99 ingredients and suggested flavour matches for each of them. That said, it is a book to inspire serious cooks, particularly those who want to be experimental and step away from the rigid adherence to the recipe.

Riding on a wave of cookbooks the last decade oriented more towards process, Segnit follows up on her already mind-blowing Flavor Thesaurus with this cornucopia of dishes. There are (very) approximately 300,000 words to keep you occupied, or around three airport novels worth. Lateral Cooking is a comprehensive work and notable academic achievement, taking a fresh perspective on a well worn subject that will have you thinking about cooking in a new way. So, for example, in the potato gnocchi entry Segnit tells you about the flour potato weight and add flour in patient increments but there is no explicit recipe. Lateral Cooking is, in a sense, the ‘method’ companion to its bestselling predecessor, The Flavour Thesaurus – and is just as useful, ingeniously organised and enjoyable to read.

Lateral Cooking by Niki Segnit, bestselling author of The Flavour Thesaurus, provides a detailed examination of the key techniques and culinary categories that underpin contemporary cookery. The three spot colours used throughout function like a key, and a clear visual hierarchy helps differentiate between Segnit’s prose, recipe instructions, helpful postscripts and flavour suggestions. But as she tested the combinations that informed The Flavor Thesaurus , she detected the basic rubrics that underpinned most recipes. This may result in small marks to the dustjacket and title page, please also bear in mind that each signature will be a little different from the one we show here.Op een vermakelijke manier laat Segnit je zien hoe gerechten ‘werken’ en hoe je zelf kunt gaan experimenteren, bedenken en ontdekken. This book close to fundamentally changed my way of cooking and is still one of the books I regularly use. 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. So, in addition to the flavouring suggestions, each starting point recipe comes with a list of ‘leeway’ bullet points that illustrate the different ways the basic recipe can be prepared and variations in ingredients (and this is before you get on to the more major variations of the flavouring suggestions). By grouping and linking techniques and outcomes the authors wends their way through a wide array of dishes and presents connections I had not made.