Customer Reviews

The Flavour Thesaurus

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Saw this in a bookstore but, of course, saved HUGE money buying it on Amazon (plus I added a couple more books for free :) shipping). The authour must have spent years putting this together and researching the flavour combinations. Of course some of it is up to your personal tastes but there are too many very, very excellent tips and suggestions and flavour combination facts in this book for you to not have it as part of your essential cookbook reference library. I quote from page 126 as an example: "EGG & VANILLA - Vanilla spirits away the eggy flavor that can be particularly unwelcome in pastries and desserts..." The book, as it's title suggests, is in thesaurus format with a brief description of the main ingredient then the main ingredient and it's companion ingredient listed with it. There are multiple entries for each ingredient. For example: Broccoli & Anchovy, Broccoli & Bacon, Broccoli & Cauliflower, etc, etc. I am very happy to have purchased this book and would have not been disappointed had I paid full price for it, which buying on sale at Amazon I did not pay full price :)

Fantastic! This book is exactly what it is described to be: a thesaurus - written in the language of flavor.

I was not expecting another recipe book - I have several of those collecting dust on a shelf in my kitchen. At this point, It makes sense that as a cook, one can create whatever they can imagine if they know how to get there. This book helps with the flavor aspect of creation.

This book fills the void of knowledge when a creative cook is perfecting a recipe or missing an ingredient.

I find this book more valuable than a recipe book, since I am constantly trying to improve nearly every recipe I come across.

This book is excellent for the cook that prefers a "cook book" to a "recipe book". It has quickly replaced my other cook books as my go-to book when I'm trying to build some new flavours into an old meal or piece together a new main course without worrying about flavour clashes. My Girlfriend has commented that I've "moved to the next level of gourmet" since I've gotten this book!

I bought this book as a present for my husband, the chef in our household, but began reading it out of curiosity on the commute home, and I haven't been able to part with it since. I'm a mere Padowan in the foodie order, but I loved Nora Ephron's 'Heartburn' and Nigella Lawson's 'How to Eat', and this book is very much in the same vein - though thankfully much more lighthearted for missing the background drama.

I'm surprised 'Digest' has left such a critical review (particularly as they've then gone on to give 4 stars!) To my mind, the concept of 'The Flavour Thesaurus' is utterly, utterly genius.
Segnit has taken 99 basic flavours (mint, coriander, basil, strawberry etc) and researched 980 pairings of them. The result is part recipe-book, part food memoir, part flavour compendium. (We've had various discussions as to whether 'Thesaurus' is a misnomer over at Amazon.co.uk - now of course, we're going to argue over 'Flavor' annd 'Flavour'!)

Some of the flavour pairings are familiar, such as Bacon & Egg, whilst others (Avocado & Mango, anyone?) are not. Now and then, Segnit provides a recipe; many of these sound incredible, and despite being the most amateur of cooks, I reckon even I could manage many of them. Under Melon & Rose, for example, she merely tells you to drown a cantaloupe melon in rosewater syrup, so that it tastes like "a fruity take on gulab jamun". Can you even read that sentence without wanting to dash to the Indian supermarket for the ingredients?

It's a shame the previous reviewer seems to have disliked the author's anecdotes, as personally I found them really jolly. Segnit peppers the book with restaurant and dish recommendations, in a really enthusiastic, unpretentious, eating-out-with-your-mates "you really have to try this" way, and she is a SUPERB writer. Modern cookery writing seems to fall into three distinct camps: venomous snob, obsessed with tablecloths and ambience rather than the food itself; faux-geezer dahn the faux-pub; and flirty girl breathlessly enthusing over cake. With 'The Flavour Thesaurus', Segnit may well have ended the careers of many of these over-hyped morons.

For a start, her prose is endlessly entertaining. Breezy erudition sits alongside hilarious similes. She is a whizz with description: when she tells you that cloves on their own taste the same as sucking on a rusty nail, you half suspect she conducted a comparative taste test just to be sure. She incorporates references so wide-ranging that both Sybil Kapoor and Velma from Scooby Doo rate a mention. Then there are her unmissable riffs: p 148 instructs us on that "essentially unitary quantity, fishandchips", whilst reading about Instinctos will have you snorting with laughter (and visiting Pizza Hut at the first excuse). I have now read 'The Flavour Thesaurus' from cover to cover, and still I have not finished.

I must temper my enthusiasm with a few tiny criticisms just to prove this is a genuine review. At full price, it's expensive for a book without illustrations or photographs (though thankfully Amazon has discounted it). It assumes a certain level of prior culinary knowledge, which was sometimes frustrating to a novice like me, though it won't bother those with lots of cookbooks and greater competence in the kitchen. The integration of the recipes into the text - Elizabeth David and Simon Hopkinson style - can be irksome until you've got busy with post-it notes. The index needs further sub-division: 'crab', for example, offers 11 entries in the index, but the recipe for crab cakes is easily missed under Butternut Squash & Bacon.

But these are such minor complaints given the enormous appeal of this book. My husband hovers over it constantly, anxious for his promised present. My brother and my best friend have already asked to borrow it. `The Flavour Thesaurus' is truly a classic in the making, and no foodie's bookshelf is going to be complete without it.

ETA I forgot to mention a problem we've discovered at Amazon.co.uk - something about this book makes it a magnet for light-fingered friends and relations. I bought our first copy in June - and (excluding legitimate presents) are now on our third...Write your name inside or yours might suffer the same fate.

Part cookbook, part reference compendium, The Flavor Thesaurus provides a fun and unique guide to flavour pairings. Niki Segnit, a food and beverage marketer from London, has chosen 99 common ingredients and categorized them into 16 families. The "Earthy" category includes mushroom and cumin; the "Woodland" group features carrot and hazelnut; the "Creamy Fruity" highlights are mango and coconut. The book dedicates a few pages to each flavour, detailing what pairs well with it and why (some pairings even include a recipe). The dyads range from the classic (tomato & basil, chocolate & peanut) to the obscure (watermelon & pork, banana & caviar), leaving little doubt that the author did exhaustive research to assemble such a comprehensive volume. The writing is witty and engaging to boot, making for an enjoyable lesson in cooking, culture and culinary science.

The reveiwer D M Vere seems to be reviewing a different book. I have this book and it contains many recipes and these are listed in a two page recipe index! I'd note that it's also had loads of amazing reviews by respected reviewers for the quality of the writing.

I was keen to get my hands on this book as I was fed up with the idea that the hobby cook's role is one of 'follower of recipes'. The primary stated aim of the book was what you might imagine - to examine pairings of certain flavours. An admirable aim tackling a poorly represented segment of the market, and although I feel Ms. Segnit has made a fair start in this area, I'm not convinced she has achieved what she set out to do.

I will start with an example, because I can see from the number of people who have found the non-5-star reviews helpful that there are either a lot of fans of this book (itself worth bearing in mind - mine is only one opinion) or a lot of friends of Segnit. This first example, a full entry (i.e. not a snippet of one), is one that I picked out at random:

'Pea & Oily Fish: According to New England tradition, gardeners make sure to plant their peas by Patriot's Day (19 April), in the hope that they'll be ready for the traditional Independence Day feast of poached salmon, fresh green peas and new potatoes. Strawberry shortcake is served for dessert.'

Now, this is vaguely interesting. It tells me about a culinary tradition in a part of the world I have never visited. What it doesn't tell me is why that combination might be good, how good it is, what kinds of oily fish might go better with peas, what it is about the flavour of peas that might complement, offset, balance, overpower, augment or improve the flavour of the fish, etc. The book is full of this kind of entry.

However, for the sake of balance I would also like to mention that the book does occasionally present some very interesting information on certain ingredients and flavours: their history, what separates them from similar ingredients, etc. And once in a while you will come across an entry that lives up to the book's stated aim by providing details as to how ingredients combine and complement one another (the Cabbage & Shellfish is one I found at random). The latter are just that little bit too thin on the ground for me to give the book any higher than three stars.

Too often the book strays back into the territory of the cookery book, detracting from the focus on the gap in the market Segnit said needed filled and that inspired her to write the book. Take this full entry as an example (again, at random):

'Chestnut & Pear: Hold back some of the chestnuts you bought for the stuffing at Christmas and serve them on Boxing Day in a salad of chopped pear, the best bits of dark turkey meat and some dark green leaves.'

I agree with the other reviewers who said that the book is cheaply produced, though personally I'm not overly bothered about this (...yet; I might change my mind once it starts falling to pieces in a few months time). A tiny niggle is that the name is ill-considered: a thesaurus provides synonyms, not word combinations, so a flavour thesaurus would in theory provide ingredient alternatives. Anyway, that's taking the review into the realm of pedantry. (EDIT: Have just seen that another reviewer noticed this point about the naming, though I should point out that her husband's comment regarding the etymology is irrelevant, as the meaning in modern-day English is what counts.)

So, to sum up, for me personally it's hit and miss. The scope of the book's aims as set out in the introduction are telling: Segnit has aimed to do too much. She wanted to examine flavour combinations (but had to restrict herself to 99 ingredients), present interesting information and anecdotes, keep it readable rather than purely a reference book and offer recipe ideas (i.e. not 200ml of this, 500g of that, but like the Chestnut & Pear example above). That's far too broad an aim, and to my mind she falls short on all accounts. The result is a book not suited to cover-to-cover reading and not suited to being a consistently reliable reference work (too often you'll look a pairing up and end up thinking 'that doesn't really tell me anything'). More focus would have improved the book considerably.

My view is of course coloured by what I was looking for in the book: an analysis (albeit not scientific) of flavour pairings, on the basis of which I would learn more about why certain ingredients might work together. If this is what you're looking for you might be a little disappointed. If you want a chatty, slightly meandering read for dipping into when on the toilet, in the car or (perhaps) strapped to the wings of a biplane, then this is a quite interesting book.

This is an enjoyable book for any food-loving reader, and I'd recommend it (halfheartedly) to anyone who likes to browse through food books. You should know, however, that the whole 'thesaurus' gambit, which gives the book its name and structure, is really just a marketing peg on which to hang a bunch of anecdotes, ideas, and recipe-sketches, (together with what seem, occasionally, to be summaries from someone's google searching). The knowledgeable bits are worthwhile, but don't take the 'flavour-wheel' idea seriously. And don't buy this book if you're prone to be irked by authorial showing-off (which is much in evidence). Overall, I found that the experience of reading this is a bit like going to a dinner party with your most annoying friends. They are your friends. There's lots to like. And they do often have interesting things to say. Thankfully,--and unlike at that dinner party -- you can skip the bits that get tedious or pretentious, and thanks to that this book turns out to be more fun than you might imagine.

I believed that I was getting a great book about seasonings and recipes .I have found maybe three recipes in it and the flavour portion is not very well written . I felt the book is a rip-off and nowhere lives up to its billing . D M V

I ordered from Amazon, through Amazing Books, because of the good reviews. However, the book didn't arrive in time to give it to my godparents for Christmas, despite a purchase guarantee that it would. When I reported this, Amazon simply refunded my money. But I had already told my aunt and uncle what I was giving them so I went to buy it at Chapters. THEN, the book arrived and Amazon charged me. So not only did it not arrive on time for Christmas, I ended up paying for the book TWICE. I will not shop through them again.