A rigorous, nuts-and-bolts bible of a book, which works from the premise that there are base recipes from which all others can be built... It's elegantly designed and extremely broad -- Jay Rayner * Observer *

A rigorous, nuts-and-bolts bible of a book, which works from the premise that there are base recipes from which all others can be built... It's elegantly designed and extremely broad (Jay Rayner Observer) Food writer Segnit ( The Flavor Thesaurus) brings a vast breadth of knowledge to this massive and quietly playful exploration of the art and science of cooking . . . Her mission is to present intuitive cooking as a learnable skill, one that can be developed through an understanding of how certain foods relate to each other in terms of how they are prepared . . . This extraordinary cookbook provides a treasure map full of both straightforward satisfactions and rewarding detours." -- starred review, Publishers Weekly It is an absolute triumph, want to take a week off work to read it and cook as I go... cannot recommend enough! If you loved The Flavour Thesaurus, this is basically Christmas -- Rukmini Iyer In that moment, I learned how important it is to celebrate simplicity, to concentrate on the quality of ingredients and diligence of cooking. It’s so easy to add just another ingredient – it’s a sign of skill to leave your ingredients to sing. Cook with wine you want to drink Is it good bedtime reading? Oh yes. There are (very) approximately 300,000 words to keep you occupied, or around three airport novels worth.

For prepping vegetables, I swear by a tomato knife. We use them a lot at work: small, serrated Victorinox knives with red handles. If you’re struggling with a peeler for celeriac or butternut squash, a tomato knife with its sawing action can get right through it. I wouldn’t use it to bone a leg of lamb, but for all kinds of vegetable cookery, they’re really good. And they stay sharper for longer as well. Lateral Cooking is, in a sense, the ‘method’ companion to its bestselling predecessor, The Flavour Thesaurus – and is just as useful, ingeniously organised and enjoyable to read. Niki Segnit used to follow recipes to the letter, even when she'd made a dish a dozen times. But as she tested the combinations that informed The Flavor Thesaurus , she detected the basic rubrics that underpinned most recipes. Lateral Cooking offers these formulas, which, once readers are familiar with them, will prove infinitely adaptable.

Do you feel you that you follow recipes slavishly without understanding how they actually work? Would you like to feel freer to adapt, to experiment, to play with flavours? The book focuses on providing readers with the methods and the understanding to develop their own approach to cookery, so photography felt too prescriptive in this context. However, Segnit’s text introduces an enormously broad range of dishes from different culinary traditions around the world and from throughout history, many of which would be unfamiliar, and which would benefit from illustration of some kind. We all felt that the inclusion of imagery would enrich the reading experience, and that it still had an important communicative part to play.” The cookbooks that teach you the most are the rare ones, experimental or not, that are so well written that you find yourself reading them greedily on a perpetual loop. Lateral Cooking is one of them (Bee Wilson Times Literary Supplement) From the author of The Flavour Thesaurus comes this collection of recipes arranged on a continuum, meaning simple tweaks give you a whole new dish * Domestic Sluttery *Who’s the author? Niki Segnit is probably best known as the author of The Flavour Thesaurus, the culinary version of Roget’s Thesaurus, which listed 99 ingredients and suggested flavour matches for each of them. Lateral Cooking is designed as a companion volume to The Flavour Thesaurus. When slow-cooking, braising or sautéeing vegetables, choose a pan where the vegetables sit no more than 3cm deep. In this way the water can evaporate successfully and you concentrate the delicious flavour and encourage caramelisation. Otherwise they boil and sweat in their own juices. I often say to chefs that, when cooking vegetables, our job is to get rid of the water in them, so we’re left with the essence of the vegetable. Segnit is a brilliantly clever cook who sometimes seems to have eaten every great dish in the world, but the real joy is her exuberant voice, which feels like listening to a witty friend.”— The Sunday Times (UK) Never boring, always illuminating, Segnit calls her approach 'learning to cook sideways.' If you can make soda bread, then try biscuits. Once you’ve mastered biscuits, go on to cobblers, then yeast bread, and brioche is just around the corner" - MarthaStewart.com