The Flavour Thesaurus| Niki Segnit.

One afternoon during the height of the first lockdown I sat quietly peering out the window with a mug of tea and a cigarette, flicking through cookbooks, contemplating lockdown and where the hospitality trade is heading and what I should be doing with myself.

The idea for the website and YouTube channel had been rattling around in my head for a while, and with a bit of thought quickly made sense. A few days passed and all the pieces seemed to fit together, all that was missing was a name.

Then one night before bed I picked up one of my food bibles - The Flavour Thesaurus and started opening it at random pages looking for inspiration. A few of the flavour combinations had a good ring to them : Chocolate & Thyme, Bacon & Thyme, Parsnip and Pork, and a few others. So I jotted them down and decided to sleep on it. By the morning Bacon & Thyme had stuck.

It’s only fitting that the name for this site should come from one of my most cherished cookbooks. This book has been, and still is, a vital reference and source of inspiration for me whenever I’m menu writing or experimenting with new ideas and helped me learn to pair flavours in more subtle and interesting ways. Everyone needs a copy of this book in their kitchen, and let me tell you why…

By compiling the Flavour thesaurus, Niki Segnit, a former marketing executive, now flavour mixing master, has given every aspiring cook the basic tools to understanding why simple, familiar combinations that we all know and love work so well together and at the same time opens up a world of more unusual, sometimes counter intuitive combinations for the more adventurous and playful cook to experiment with.

During her introduction she openly admits that she used to be scared to try new things in the kitchen and was unwilling to deviate from recipes and experiment freely without fear of what might go wrong (a very common feeling!) and how a meal served at a friends house with flavours that she couldn’t have imagined would work together set her on her journey of flavour discovery. Her eyes open to new worlds of possibilities, she searched for a reference to guide her though this new exciting world of food and flavour but couldn’t find one, so she decided to create the flavour thesaurus itself, or as she rather charmingly puts it;

“...But no such book existed and so, with what turned out in hindsight to be almost touching naivety, I thought I might try to compile one myself.”

Compile one she did and the result is a kitchen reference all cooks should own. The central idea of moving away from recipes, your reliance on them, becoming a more resourceful and creative cook and learning how to pair ingredients and flavours is delivered with wit, charm, encouragement and a shed load of knowledge discovered on the way to writing this book. Here she is on breaking free of following recipes to the letter.

“One of the great satisfactions of discovering more about flavour combinations is the confidence it gives you to strike out on your own. Following instructions in a recipe is like parroting pre-formed sentences from a phrasebook. Forming an understanding of how flavours work together, on the other hand, is like learning the language: it allows you to express yourself freely, to improvise, to find appropriate substitutions for ingredients, to cook a dish the way you fancy cooking it. You’ll be surprised how rarely things go seriously wrong.”

Segnit has complied a masterpiece that beginner cooks and battle hardened chefs alike can all learn something from. The way she has done so is a feat in itself.

The basis of the book, the flavour wheel, takes 99 flavours and groups them into 17 categories, each leading to the next step along the wheel. The categories are - roasted, meaty, cheesy, earthy, mustardy, sulphurous, marine, brine & salt, green & grassy, spicy, woodland, fresh fruit. creamy fruity, citrusy, bramble & hedge, floral fruity.

The flavour wheel.

Segnit describes how the wheel came together and works.

“My first task was to draw up the list of flavours. Stopping at 99 was to some extent arbitrary. Nonetheless, a flavour thesaurus that accounted for every single flavour would be as impractical as it would uncomfortable in the lap…

…Then I sorted the flavours into categories. Most of us are familiar with the concept of flavour families, wether we know it or not. Floral, citrus, herbaceous: the sort of descriptions you might encounter on the back of a wine bottle, to help conjure an image of how something might taste. And it’s into these that the flavours are divided. The flavours in each family have certain qualities in common; in turn each family is linked in some way to the one adjacent to it, so that, in sum, they comprise a sort of 360º spectrum, represented as a flavour wheel…

…Take the Citrussy family, for example. This covers zesty, citric flavours like orange, lemon and cardamom. Cardamom, in turn, has flavour compounds in common with rosemary, which is the first flavour in the next flavour family, Bramble & Hedge…and so on round the wheel in a developing sequence of relations that might enter at lemon and leave at blue cheese.”

Each flavour comes with an introduction to set the scene and get the juices flowing. Flavour parings come with a small description and information on flavour compounds, a small titbit of science, history, culture or a funny anecdote or recipe written in the short hand style of victorian cookbooks. Let’s look at the entry for bacon and thyme as an example…

“Bacon and thyme make an agreeable savoury seasoning. Try them with Puy lentils, partridge or Brussel sprouts. Pungent thyme is used to flavour mouthwashes, toothpastes and cough medicine, and is said to have antiseptic properties. Smoked bacon also has a whiff of the first aid box about it, as the smoking process can impart medicinal iodine characters. Might sound unappetising on paper, but can be very delicious in practice. After all, single malt whiskies like Laphroaig and Lagavulin are often described as having notes of iodine, seaweed, tar and sticking plasters.”

Not all the pairings are flavours that are so common or intuitive, try looking up some of the more unusual and complex match ups; basil & clove that share key flavour compounds, blueberry & blue cheese or the seemingly odd pair of onion & orange.

The Flavour Thesaurus is well written, clear, easy to understand and, a unique, remarkable achievement. Pick up a copy and you’ll be forever flicking through it’s pages looking for the next way to tweek a favourite old recipe and freshen it up or to give you the spark to try something new in the kitchen.

It’s a book to, as Segnit herself says, “get the juices flowing.”

Buy your copy here!

Enjoy.

Dan.

The Flavour Thesaurus was first published in 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.

ISBN 978 0 7475 9977 7

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