Lateral Cooking: Foreword by Yotam Ottolenghi

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My pizza dough is done but still needs time to prove, so I part ways with my tutor and head home to cook it later on. When I do, it proves to be another triumph. I top them with chilli and chorizo for the adults, and broccoli and sweetcorn for my two-year-old daughter and her dinner date (I have never seen them both hoover up veg so willingly). But I would be lying if I said that, while I was making them, I didn’t think about maybe baking a loaf with the dough instead. Or perhaps adding a bit more oil to make focaccia? Or how about folding it around a rolled out slab of butter and having a go at croissants? Or I could cut them into rings and … 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. What won’t I like? Whether or not you like the book will depend on how willing you are to go with Segnit’s basic conceit of the cooking continuum, how important you feel it is to understand cooking from that perspective and if you agree that it will turn you into an instinctive cook (if you are not one already) and if that’s what you want to be. 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 * Sunday Times * 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

Lateral Cooking is as inspirational and entertaining a read as it is a practical guide. Once you have the hang of each starting point, a wealth of flavour possibilities awaits, each related in Niki's signature combination of culinary science, history, chefs' wisdom and personal anecdote. You will realise that recipes that you had thought were outside of your experience are reassuringly similar to things you've made a dozen times before. It will give you the confidence to experiment with flavour, and adapt with the seasons or the contents of your fridge. You will, in short, learn to cook 'by heart'- and that's where the fun really begins. Pure, informative delight . . . Segnit not only covers continents but also makes deft, slyly humorous work of connecting their dishes. Each chapter, or 'continuum, ' offers basic recipes for starting points, followed by a 'leeway' section for adaptations and 'flavors and variations' to spark creativity . . . Segnit effortlessly glides readers up and over her culinary Everest. They descend as confident, improvisational cooks, with a base knowledge of the relationship between dishes that allows them to adapt recipes from other books, make bread from memory and let the ingredients lead. 'It's a question of confidence, ultimately, ' she writes. 'Nail the daily loaf and brioche feels like less of a challenge.' Even if nailing the daily loaf isn't at the top of your list of 2020 resolutions, reading the work of this culinary powerhouse most certainly should be." - New York Times Book Review Even if I go by another book, I often have this one next by to understand the logic (the book is basically a collection of canonical dishes in their most abstract form and then with all the variations listed as text).My mum’s amusing if retrograde tip, which she read in an American magazine in the 1970s, is: lay the table first, so your returning husband, or arriving guests, will think you’re further on with dinner than you really are. I ignore this (as does she: Dad lays the table at theirs), but I enjoy the general message that the illusion of having everything under control can help make it so. Horseradish sauce needs sugar; keep your utensils close 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. 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 * Should I buy it? If you don’t own a copy of Larousse Gastronomique, Le guide culinaire by Escoffier or La Repertoire de la Cuisine and are a novice cook who wants to take a more serious approach to learning the craft, then Lateral Cooking will fit the bill. If you already have a decent cookbook collection and are an accomplished cook, you may want to carefully consider how likely you are to cook through the book in the manner intended. However, it may fill a gap in your collection as a modern reference work.

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 There are books by the starriest names – Jamie has done Italy and Deliciously Ella has cooked with more plants – but the key thing about this season’s crop is originality and diversity. Knowledgeable and humorous, with a focus on flavour and technique, this cookbook is informative, useful and sure to become a kitchen bible to many -- Guardian * 'Best Books of 2018' * Segnit’s book is about highlighting such links, but it is about other things, too: repeating recipes until they are drilled into your head; being unafraid to make mistakes; recognising that there is no “correct” way; accepting that each dish allows a certain amount of leeway; getting a sense for how things look and feel. This latter point becomes apparent when we move onto pizza dough while our flatbreads rest. Instead of relying on scales or measuring cups, Segnit encourages me to knead away while adding flour or water until the dough feels soft and silky. When it feels perfect, we put it aside to prove. 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)A revelatory approach to cooking techniques . . . Segnit is a witty and experienced writer." - Library Journal, starred review A groundbreaking handbook--the "method" companion to its critically acclaimed predecessor, The Flavor Thesaurus-- with a foreword by Yotam Ottolenghi.

Clingfilm makes a great emergency belt for your too-loose chef trousers or apron with missing string. Taste, taste and taste some more; adapt your ingredientsSeason a dish lightly as you go. If you’re making a curry, for example, add a pinch of salt along with the spices once the onions have browned, then again when the dish is close to being finished. What you’re doing is building up layers of seasoning and flavour. If you season right at the end of the dish, you’re more likely to over-season it (which I’m sadly finding to be true, cooking saltless meals for two adults and a nine-month-old baby). If you join everything up it makes things so much simpler and within your ability, because each thing is only a little bit different to something you’ve done before,” she reasons.