The Flavour Thesaurus – a bible for anyone who cooks by grabbing ingredients from the fridge – includes tips on imaginative food combinations from white chocolate and olives to bacon and pineapple.
But the book, which has been translated into over a dozen languages, still isn’t comprehensive enough for its writer and tireless food-lover Niki Segnit, who has revealed to The Independent the combinations she wishes she could now include.
“In the south of Italy they pair aubergine and chocolate. It’s like a chocolate pancake,” she said. “Slice and fry the aubergines, and put booze in a chocolate ganache with dried peel and nuts. It’s incredibly delicious."
The combination works because aubergine has a neutral flavour, she explained.
Floral raspberry and deep and musky elderberry is another combination she wishes she could have included. “It’s one of those very harmonies matches."
Pear cooked in sauvignon blanc, rather than the traditional red, is another winner, she added.
“Red wine can dominate but this combination gives that crispness and the herbal qualities of a sauvignon blanc.”
But pear and nutmeg, she cautions, is one flavour she certainly wouldn’t include.
“My poor husband blind tasted the combinations and I gave him a very nutmeggy pear pudding and he thought it was parsnip.
“It was really horriblem but those mistakes can teach you things," she said.
Segnit hopes her book, which she spent three years working on before it was released in 2010, will also have an impact on food waste by giving people the confidence to step away from recipe books and experiment with what is in their cupboard.
Novices in the kitchen who are daunted by flavours should simply allow themselves the time to gain a footing, says Segnit.
“When you are cooking something up that you are using for the first time always take a bit, try to be on your own, concentrate, close your eyes, and really taste it.”
Try some of Segnit's flavour combinations taken from The Flavour Thesaurus below.
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