SpiceLines

One of the pleasures of shopping at Heywood Hill is snagging must-reads that won’t be available here for at least another year.

So when its Summer Reading List came in the mail, I pounced. (Hooray for Skype!) At the top of my list: Niki Segnit’s A Flavour Thesaurus: Pairings, Recipes and Ideas for the Creative Cook.

I am fascinated by the way bay leaves bring out vanilla’s floral essence. Or how easily a tiny pinch of cayenne balances the sweet and sour flavors of watermelon-tomato gazpacho doused with lime. It has long seemed to me that if you know enough about flavors and the way they interact, you’d have little need for recipes—as long as you also know basic techniques.

Niki Segnit felt the same way. With a background in marketing, she worked with global food companies for two decades, “developing new brands, new products and new flavours,” a career which has likely taken her in and out of the chemistry lab, giving her access to some of the more arcane aspects of flavor composition.

But in the book she describes herself as “an ordinary, if slightly obsessive home cook” who wants to shake off her dependence on recipes. Reading her Thesaurus is like sitting down for chat with a brainy, slightly wacky friend who not only spends hours in the kitchen, but also travels and reads widely, knows chefs well enough to coax intriguing recipes from them, and has an intellectual curiosity about, oh, everything. Bloomsbury, which published the book, says she’s been known “to cook nothing but the cuisine of a single country for a month.”

Luckily, like me, she’s married to a man who eats everything.

In spite of its research-y title, The Flavor Thesaurus is actually a personal compendium of all the delicious flavors in Segnit’s world and the ways they go, or don’t go, together. She herself confesses to arbitrarily picking 99 flavors, some of which might be a bit surprising, at least to Americans: Washed-rind cheese, for instance, or Black Pudding. Even more surprising are the ones she left out: black pepper, salt, vinegar, rice and pasta, because “their flavour affinities are so wide as to exclude themselves by virtue of sheer compatibility.” Potatoes made it into the book, courgettes (zucchini) did not.

(“All I can say to the courgette fan is a) sorry, and b) this book makes no claim to be the last word on the subject,” she says blithely.)

The flavor wheel from Segnit's Thesaurus divides 99 flavors into 16 families. Bramble & Hedge ranges from Rosemary to Blackberry. What links them? Hints of clove and mint.

Similar flavors are grouped into families—Citrussy, Floral Fruity and the very English-sounding Bramble and Hedge, for instance—which are laid end to end, each one linked in some way to the families which come before and after. Ultimately this methodology is used to create a 360 degree flavor wheel (you can see a section in the photograph above).

To maintain her “sanity,” Segnit limits herself to 900-odd flavor pairings (out of a boggling 4,851 possibilities). Some are classic, others are definitely outside the box. You’ll find rosemary paired with the usual suspects, for instance—lamb, pork and garlic—but also with anchovies and chocolate, two matches I'd never considered. Here’s what she says about Rosemary & Chocolate:

“A backdrop of dark chocolate shows off rosemary’s cool, evergreen flavours. If this recalls the lovely combination of Chocolate & Cardamom (see page 14), that’s because the dominant flavour compound in both rosemary and cardamom is cineole, common to bay leaf too (think how all three make great milk-based desserts). Cineole has woody eucalyptus, slightly minty notes. In rosemary, these are joined by peppery, camphorous characters, while cardamom takes it in a more citrusy, floral direction—you might say chocolate with rosemary is a wintry alternative to chocolate and cardamom.”

(Cineole is why rosemary and cardamom fall together on the flavour wheel. They also link the Citrussy and Bramble & Hedge families.)

If this is more chemistry than you want, she also gives David Wilson’s recipe for ‘Little Pots of Chocolate and Rosemary Cream.’ It sounded so divine when I read it at 5 AM that I rose from my bed to clip a sprig of rosemary in the garden, then ransacked the pantry until I came up with a bar of L.A. Burdick’s Grenada chocolate (75% cacao), only to be thwarted by the lack of heavy cream in the fridge. Otherwise I would have proceeded to make and eat this delicious-sounding dessert as the sun was coming up. (As it was, I just ate the chocolate.)

Segnit’s breezy style makes the book hugely fun to read. Like the idea of figs and vanilla? “Tempus fugit. One day we’ll all have dentures and, for all its boozy, floral perfume, this seed-riddled twosome will seem as attractive as a poke in the eye with a breadstick.” Parsley is “the Hail Mary to the sin of garlic breath.” Nutmeg, grated over avocado, will “transform the mildest mannered mummy’s boy into Javier Bardem,” (courtesy of its sexy-hallucinogenic attributes).

If I have a quibble, it’s with the organization of the book. I understand why Segnit didn’t want to repeat herself —the Coriander Leaf & Mango pairing is found under Mango, with only a page reference under Coriander—but that leads to a lot of flipping back and forth. Reading about Nutmeg, I ran across a good idea for grating it into applesauce (Nutmeg & Apple) and loved her recipe for spaghetti corfiote (Nutmeg & Lamb), but to check out Nutmeg & Egg I had to flip to the Egg chapter for an interesting recipe for eggnog tart. There, however, I was sidetracked by Egg & Cumin (quail eggs dipped in the ground spice) and Egg & Lemon (avgolemono soup, of course). But for Egg & Ginger, I had to turn to the Ginger chapter—well you get the picture. Forty-five minutes later, I’d had a very pleasurable excursion through the flavor world, but had completely forgotten why I was looking up nutmeg in the first place.

What pairs with carrots? Spices, of course--allspice, cinnamon, clove and cumin--but also surprising ingredients like tarragon and pistachio oil, says The Flavor Bible which lists 84 matches for the ubiquitous root vegetable.

This will not happen when you consult my other go-to-guide, The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America’s Most Imaginative Chefs.

Authors Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, who won a James Beard Award for the book in 2009, have created an A to Z encyclopedia of hundreds of ingredients, ranging from Achiote Seeds to Zucchini Blossoms. It features thousands of pairings ranked by how often they were mentioned by a panel of top chefs. There are no recipes, but the chefs are often quoted about the way they use flavor affinities to create dishes.

Pairings are an efficient way of, say, figuring out what to do with all the mint that is overtaking your herb garden. Turn to MINT—IN GENERAL, and you will learn that its season is spring-autumn, its taste is sweet and its function is cooling, along with the comment: “Mint suggests ‘false coolness’ and adds a note of freshness to dishes.”

Then comes a list of 132 pairings. The M.O. is that affinities suggested by “one or more experts” appear in regular type: for example, onion, esp. red or raspberries. Those in bold were recommended by “a number of experts,” as eggplant or potatoes, esp. new. Pairings “highly recommended by an even greater number of experts” are shown in bold caps, as CHOCOLATE, ESP. DARK, and “holy grail” matches are listed in bold caps with an asterisk: LAMB*.

The result is that you can quickly whiff through the mint list checking out good, better and best matches. You’ll also see the heading AVOID, which cites oregano with the qualifier, “say some.” Finally there’s a short list of three-way affinities: mint+chocolate+cream; mint+cucumber+vinegar; and so on.

Excerpts from chef interviews flesh out this shorthand approach. Johnny Iuzzini of Jean Georges, for instance, confesses to “a serious thing for black peppermint," which, he says, “works best with something light like an infusion or granita.” That insight led him to invent “a tangy lychee gelee that was served under oven-roasted Tristar strawberries tossed lightly with balsamic vinegar. On top of the strawberries, we scooped the black peppermint sorbet.”

If only Iuzzini—or the authors—had given us the recipe!

Still, this is a useful approach to flavor, one that’s likely to get you thinking in new directions: mint and buttermilk, for instance, or mint and mushrooms. (I did notice that the authors don’t include chocolate and rosemary as a recommended pairing, however.)

The trouble is that lists are dry. The authors don’t tell us a thing about pairing mint with beef, except to print “beef” in regular type, which means that one or two chefs mentioned the match.

Segnit, naturally, tells us more, first managing to get in a comic dig at the French: “A Journalist for Le Parisien recently wrote that, as a nation who served boiled beef with mint, the British had no right to comment on anything to do with agricultural policy. On the coach trip of international cuisine, we Brits, so the journalist implied, were the hapless child whose mother had packed him egg sandwiches while the rest of Europe gagged into their satchels.”

Noting that the Brits actually eat mint with lamb, not beef, she goes on to mention Vietnamese spring rolls, soups and salads, all of which feature combinations of beef and mint, as well as a communal meal enjoyed by the Portuguese during the Festival of the Holy Spirit: “slowly simmered, spicy beef broth, poured over a thick slice of bread, a chunk of beef and cabbage garnished with a mint sprig.”

I like both approaches, actually, and am happy to have both books on my shelf. They are, so to speak, a perfect match.

The Flavour Thesaurus: Pairings, Recipes and Ideas for the Creative Cook, Niki Segnit, Bloomsbury, 2010. Available from Heywood Hill, London, and, in the U.S., from various sellers on Amazon. (Note that recipes in the British edition have metric measurements.)

The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America’s Most Imaginative Chefs, Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg. Little, Brown, 2008. Widely available in bookstores and on Amazon.