Image via WikipediaA Matchmaker for Your Taste BudsTo savor "The Flavor Thesaurus" fully it helps to think of its author, Niki Segnit, as a culinary marriage broker. An imaginative but practical matchmaker, she has a gift for pairing sometimes lackluster ingredients in a way that brings out the best in them and makes them more appealing as a couple than they ever were as loners.
Starting with almost 100 ingredients—fruits, vegetables, meat, poultry and seafood—Ms. Segnit develops 980 pairings, including complete recipes, and then divides them into 16 favor categories—e.g., "Earthy" and "Berry & Bush." Even experienced home cooks will find much that is new and challenging here: a horseradish-spuds pairing livens up the usual bland mashed potatoes or potato salad; an anchovy-beef union adds an extra dimension to routine beef stew; and a ginger-cabbage match puts zing and spicy-sweet edge into a simple stir fry.(more after the break)
The Flavor Thesaurus
By Niki Segnit Bloomsbury, 383 pages, $27
Or consider what Ms. Segnit does with the lowly cauliflower: 16 dazzlingly different pairings, from the tastily traditional (with potatoes or cheese) to the adventurously outré (with caviar or chocolate). We are even treated, if that's the word, to a cauliflower dessert course: New York restaurateur Anthony Flinn's "cauliflower trifle," an outer-limit purée of cauliflower and cream with grape jelly and brioche. For the more conventionally minded, Ms. Segnit offers her own recipe for cauliflower with capers, which can be tossed together with rigatoni for a simple one-dish pasta meal.
Of course, one need not limit oneself to Ms. Segnit's recipes. The whole idea of "The Flavor Thesaurus" is to experiment with combinations that, at first glance, seem unlikely. "Following the instructions in a recipe is like parroting pre-formed sentences from a phrasebook," the author reminds us. "Forming an understanding of how flavors work together, on the other hand, is like learning the language." She shares an eloquent vocabulary with us in this delicious book.
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