Lateral Cooking

This groundbreaking book 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? Would you like to feel freer to adapt, to experiment, to play with flavours?

Well look no further - in these pages, Niki Segnit, author of the landmark The Flavour Thesaurus, gives you the tools to do just that. Organised into 77 'starting-point' recipes, Lateral Cooking including plenty of tips for substituting ingredients and reducing the phenomenal variety of world cuisine down to its bare essentials - and then building it back up again.

So, under 'Bread', Niki guides you through flatbreads, oatcakes, buckwheat noodles, chapattis and tortillas, showing you how they are all variations on one theme. A few simple tweaks and you can make soda bread, scones or cobbler. And so on, through breads and batters, broths, stews and dals, one dish leading to another.

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 new flavour combinations awaits, each related in Niki's signature combination of culinary science, history, chefs' wisdom and entertaining personal anecdote.

Niki shows you that recipes you had thought were outside of your experience are reassuringly similar to things you've made a dozen times before, giving you the confidence to experiment with flavour. The variations that follow are a springboard of inspiration to the contents of your fridge and kitchen cupboards.

In these pages, you will discover to cook 'by heart' - and that's where the fun really begins.

Review

It is hard to convey just what a staggering achievement Lateral Cooking is. Segnit is truly a one-woman Larousse. Only the scope is so much wider and deeper: this book covers continents! . I can lose myself in it any time, from any page, and you could cook from it over a whole lifetime, and still be learning -- Nigella Lawson

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 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

In a year that's been a bonanza for cookbooks, this is the one I'd put top of my list ― Independent

Want to graduate from a rigid recipe-follower to an instinctive, ingredient-led cook? Niki Segnit shows you how ― Waitrose Food

What makes this book really special, just like The Flavour Thesaurus, aside from Niki's impressive expertise, is her humour and personality. It's a joy to read -- Olive magazine

A textbook you'll turn to for all your culinary core techniques and queries ― Good Housekeeping

It's a book you'll buy not so much for the recipes, though there are plenty, but the insights it will give you on how the whole process of cooking works... a cracking read -- Fiona Beckett

One of the most exciting cookery books I've read this year ― Literary Review

Niki Segnit is back with a new cookbook to break the mould (again) ― Huffington Post

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 a beautifully simple book that just makes sense. I'm hooked again -- Kenny Tutt

Niki Segnit's Lateral Cooking is a spectacularly good cookbook. If it were a novel, it'd be a shoo-in for the Booker -- Elisabeth Luard ― The Oldie

About the Author

Niki Segnit's first book, The Flavour Thesaurus, won the André Simon Award for best food book and the Guild of Food Writers Award for best debut. It has been translated into fifteen languages. Her second book, Lateral Cooking, has been called 'a staggering achievement' by Nigella Lawson, the 'book of the decade' by Elizabeth Luard and 'astonishing and addictive' by Brian Eno. It has been translated into nine languages. She lives in London with her husband and two children.