Lateral Cooking: Foreword by Yotam Ottolenghi

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Entertaining, opinionated, and inspirational, with a handsome three-color design, Lateral Cooking will have you torn between donning your apron and settling back in a comfortable chair. The result is greater creativity in the kitchen: Lateral Cooking encourages improvisation, resourcefulness, and, ultimately, the knowledge and confidence to cook by heart. Once you have the hang of each starting point, a wealth of new flavour combinations awaits, each related in Niki's signature combination of culinary science, history, chefs' wisdom and personal anecdote.

Niki Segnit, author of the landmark book The Flavour Thesaurus, gives you the tools to do just that. 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. I was surprised when I found that pan de muerto and conchas, a traditional mexican bread, is an orange scented brioche! Which is to say, one dish leads to another: once you’ve got the hang of flatbreads, for instance, then its neighbouring dishes on the continuum (crackers, soda bread, scones) will involve the easiest and most intuitive adjustment.

Alongside the illustrations, other design details such as a repeated arrow motif, stepped painted edges and footnote-styled supporting texts reflect and experiment with the visual language of traditional reference books. It will give you the confidence to experiment with flavour, and the variations that follow are a springboard of inspiration to the contents of your fridge and kitchen cupboards. The book is divided into twelve chapters covering subjects such as ‘Bread’, ‘Sauces’ or ‘Custard’, and the recipes in each chapter are arranged on a continuum, with the transition from one to the next incorporating only a tweak or two in the method or ingredients. 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. The groundbreaking new book that reveals the principles underpinning all recipe creation, from the author of the bestselling The Flavour Thesaurus Do you feel you that you follow recipes slavishly without understanding how they actually work?

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. 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.Ultimately, Signet wants her readers to develop their own recipes based on the starting points and flavouring options, so your imagination is your only limit to what you include in a recipe, which means you might have trouble finding ingredients if your ideas are really out there. The book looks at a core recipe and takes you along a continuum, so that you can tweak a bread recipe, for example, by replacing some of the liquid with another form (egg for water) and it will still work (probably! 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. So you might want to try and track down candied melon to make your own Calissons D’aix, a lozenge shaped sweet from Aix-en-Provence made with a marzipan like mix of ground almonds and flavoured with honey, Grand Marnier and orange flower water as well as the aforementioned candied melon.