My new favourite and I would recommend it to anyone who is comfortable enough cooking to break away from the traditional recipe layout and bend the rules. 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. It will give you the confidence to experiment with flavour, and adapt with the seasons or the contents of your fridge.

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. Lateral Cooking is essentially a practical book, but like The Flavour Thesaurus it’s also a highly enjoyable read. At over 600 pages long, its a brick of a book, with densely packed pages illustrated only by simple red ink line drawings. 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. Niki Segnit had not so much as peeled a potato until her early twenties, when, almost by accident, she discovered that she loved cooking.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? 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. There are (very) approximately 300,000 words to keep you occupied, or around three airport novels worth. 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. Op een vermakelijke manier laat Segnit je zien hoe gerechten ‘werken’ en hoe je zelf kunt gaan experimenteren, bedenken en ontdekken.

So, in addition to the flavouring suggestions, each starting point recipe comes with a list of ‘leeway’ bullet points that illustrate the different ways the basic recipe can be prepared and variations in ingredients (and this is before you get on to the more major variations of the flavouring suggestions). Kind of preferred The Flavour Thesaurus to this one (not a criticism in an way) but as a ginger fiend, took to the ginger loaf like a fish to water (the recipe is delicious). I was surprised when I found that pan de muerto and conchas, a traditional mexican bread, is an orange scented brioche!You will find yourself inventing novel dishes, just by applying the logic from this book, with surprising results. Her background is in marketing, specialising in food and drink, and she has worked with many famous brands of confectionary, snacks, baby foods, condiments, dairy products, hard liquors and soft drinks. This book close to fundamentally changed my way of cooking and is still one of the books I regularly use. Otherwise, I’m not sure this book would be the first I’d reach for when planning a weekly household menu for example. 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.