Photo by Louise Hagger, Emily Kydd and Jennifer Kay
I had, at one time, a book on the back burner that was to focus on the relatedness of cooking, on recipe-families that started with a mother recipe and then showed what sprung or could spring from that. But never, ever could I have imagined a volume as ambitious and as rich in scope and span as Niki Segnit’s Lateral Cooking. Having read her first book, The Flavour Thesaurus, I can’t say I’m surprised by Segnit’s scholarship, her feeling for food or, indeed, her wit. But 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!
Lateral Cooking is, as the title suggests, predicated on the relatedness of recipes, a culinary response to Forster’s “Only connect”, but despite its encyclopaedic reach, it is conversational in tone and beautifully written. 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.
Because of the very premise of the book, it is slightly to distort it to choose just one recipe, but it’s true, too, that the recipes work utterly in their own right, so I cheerfully bring you these Sweetcorn Griddle Pancakes. The sunny photograph is not actually from the book (which is, understandably, not illustrated: it runs to 612 pages as it is) but has been supplied by the publishers for use here.
Extract from Lateral Cooking by Niki Segnit (Bloomsbury £35), available now.
Photography © Louise Hagger, Emily Kydd and Jennifer Kay.
