Sometime in 2012 I was languishing in France because I had nothing good to read. Still weirdly resistant to ebooks, unwilling to pay the postage for overseas delivery, and having reread everything on my own shelf, I searched with faint hope through the selection of English novels available in the local bookstore. They were (pinch nose here) “literary.” Beautiful sentences about nihilistic individuals, containing nothing so bourgeois as a plot. I resolved never again to pick a work of fiction sight unseen off the shelf and resigned myself to reading through all seven volumes of Harry Potter again because nothing else was worth the trouble.
Then hope twinkled anew, because I found The Flavour Thesaurus.
I can’t be the only one who bought it out of sheer love for the utterly preposterous diagram of flavo(u)rs on the flyleaf—a boldly unscientific classification of individual foodstuffs from “globe artichoke” to “chili” to “watermelon” to “black pudding” within larger categories like “sulphurous,” “brine & salt,” “creamy fruity,” “bramble & hedge,” or “roasted.” But I became a devotee not in the diagram-gazing, but in the reading.
In short, The Flavour Thesaurus was a better read than 95% of the fiction I’d consumed in the previous year, and I was so sad when it ended that I started over again at the beginning.
This is no small triumph for what is, essentially, an encyclopedia, lacking a plot every bit as much as the aforementioned lousy literary novels. But the main character, to wit the opinionated and hilarious author Niki Segnit, is about ten times more lovable than even Hermoine Granger, plus you’d actually want to share a meal with her. (However, you would not want to be any of Segnit’s ex-boyfriends or ex-crushes, who do whatever is the opposite of gracing these pages with their culinary missteps. See, for example, the entry for Beef & Parsley’s discussion of a dish of marrowbones: “I once had a first date with a guy who ordered it. I quite fancied him to begin with, but the sight of him frowning at a bone, turning it over, and then over again, picking at it, smearing it on toast and adding pinches of salt like a geriatric pharmacist cast an irreversible pall over the evening.” Too bad for the bloke, but I did add marrowbones to my repertoire after this, and being safely married already, it only cemented our bond.)
The seed of the idea, as Segnit tells us, was the discovery of “the depth of my dependence on cookery books,” a notion that convicted me at once. Though I am no longer slavish in my obedience to recipes, which is due as much to laziness as to accumulated skill, I do drift to my collection again and again for inspiration. But Segnit was struck by the intuition of cooks who just knew that certain things would taste good together. Maybe such wisdom could be codified?
Hence the thesaurus of flavo(u)rs, which I still find revelatory every time I return to it. I have been confirmed in my love of Coffee & Walnut, Peanut & Carrot (down to the exact same Nigella Lawson recipe that Segnit cites), Chicken & Bell Pepper, Lamb & Apricot. I have likewise been confirmed in certain dislikes, such as of Chocolate & Strawberry: “Not all it’s cracked up to be. Strawberry’s heart-like shape and color have seen it unimaginatively match-made with that default love token, chocolate. But doesn't a strawberry dipped in chocolate just look like a fruit wearing big knickers? And aren’t they the sort of thing asset-strippers feed to call girls in cream-coloured hotel rooms? I’d take chocolate and hazelnut over these two any day.” (See also the hilarious take-down of beetroot & chocolate cake.)
But naturally the most exciting discoveries have been hitherto unimagined possibilities: Coffee & Blackcurrant (stunning), Pork & Anise (in 3-hour, 1-hour, half-hour, and 5-minute iterations, one of my favorite entries in the whole book), Goat’s Cheese & Blackberry (banon à la feuille in particular, which happy me in those days could walk two minutes to the fromager to buy for a reasonable sum), Aubergine & Nutmeg (“Freshly grated nutmeg puts the ohh into aubergines. There should be a global chain selling paper cones of nutmeggy fried aubergine slices. (Oh-bergine™. I’m rich!)”), Butternut Squash & Bacon (Segnit remarks, “The sweet saltiness of this combination reminds me of crabmeat, which was the inspiration behind this landlubber’s version of crab cakes—butternut squash and bacon cakes with lime mayonnaise”—and she is completely right, it does taste just like crab), Coriander Seed & Blueberry (I always make my blueberry muffins now with lots of freshly ground coriander).
Most of the time Segnit doesn’t offer actual recipes, assuming that if you are advanced enough as a home cook to want release from cookbooks you probably don’t need more heavy-handed instructions, but here and there she does, and they are usually wonderful—see especially poulet à la Clamart (p. 202) or the rhubarb-almond cranachan (p. 254). Other times her suggestions inspired me to new flights of fancy: not long ago I roasted a slab of pork belly and dressed it with sweet-sour soy and served it with my own homemade watermelon rind pickle, based on the description of a restaurant dish (p. 251). I also finally liberated myself from the faulty notion that cheese enhances baked eggplant and tomato—it doesn’t—by following her recommendation of pairing roasted tomatoes with anchovies. These unloved fish are the real secret to the tomato-eggplant coupling.
In time I branched out a bit into experiments of my own: for instance, I made membrillo with the motherlode of quinces we got from a neighbor, spiced with clove, which was a winning combo—the only problem being that the smell so dominated my house for the long cooking process that I couldn’t bear to face a quince again after. I’ve also found that corn adores huge quantities of black pepper, and zucchini loves thyme.
The dramatic culmination of my meanderings through The Flavour Thesaurus is that my very last dinner cooked in my own kitchen in France was made sans recipes, according to my own acquired skill set and taste combinations. Truth be told, I can’t remember any more what I made. What I do remember is my French friends declaring that I was now officially cookbook-free and should forever after cook according to my own inner élan!
Which I would have done, if Niki Segnit hadn’t gone and published another cookbook…
to be continued