Niki Segnit, The Flavor Thesaurus

kitchen exactitude & the human on the other side of the recipe

Hi everybody! Just wanted to extend a special welcome to the new subscribers pointed this way by Frank Bruni’s generous recommendation. I’m delighted to have you here. Now, on to this week’s sentence!

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“Good dressed with extra virgin olive oil, cider vinegar and cream, 5:3:2, shaken up with seasoning.”

I used to periodically convince myself that what I needed, in the kitchen, was a heaping scoop (make that a leveled scoop) of precision. Enough with the roasted potatoes with starchy centers; out with the omelets that transform, on their way to the plate, into shredded purses of scrambled eggs. Bring on the recipes formulated in kitchens suitable for pharmaceutical research; drag out the food scale and the laser thermometer. 

So I’d reach for the reassuring heft of The Food Lab or something in the America’s Test Kitchen cinematic universe. Cooking, these books seemed to say, is a lawful process; if you want sourdough-holes like this, or onion-caramelization like that, then you’d do well to set aside your artfulness and reread this passage on the Maillard reaction.

But after a few months of dutiful study — and stir-fries that tasted delicious but took as long to prepare as Thanksgiving dinner — I’d find myself chafing at the bit. Yes that salad dressing failed to emulsify but it was mine, goddamn it. Let’s just get dinner on the table. These hands were not made for pressing Tare. And so I’d venture back into the culinary wilderness — only to stagger, penitent, after one too many mediocre meals, back into the church of kitchen exactitude (the priests wearing onion goggles, the censers made by OXO).

This sorry cycle might have continued for the rest of my cooking life if I hadn’t come across Niki Segnit. Her books — The Flavor Thesaurus and Lateral Cooking — are to cooking what David Foster Wallace’s tennis essays are to sports writing; they slouch, smoking, in the back row of their chosen fields, making doodles in the margins that just happen to be more intelligent than anything in the textbooks. 

The Flavor Thesaurus (the book of hers to start with) is an encyclopedia of flavor pairings. You find yourself with a perfectly ripe tomato; here are some complementary flavors to consider: anchovy, cinnamon, sage, vanilla… Each pairing gets a few lines. Orange & Pineapple: “All the joie de vivre of a Hawaiian shirt without the stigma of wearing one.” Any given entry might include a history lesson, a recipe, a personal memory. Globe Artichoke & Bacon: “In Lazio, a boyfriend and I were speeding through a landscape of fairy-tale castles, well on our way to not living happily ever after…”. 

 There are other books that work like this (Karen Page’s The Flavor Bible is the most famous) but they read, with their glossy pages of unannotated lists, like reference books — and, like most reference books, they have a habit of going long stretches without being referenced. Segnit’s books, on the other hand, refuse to be shelved — they migrate between my bedside table and kitchen counter, picking up underlinings and olive oil stains. 

The secret to her books — the thing that distinguishes them not only from most cookbooks but from most books — is that they read as if they were written to a friend. Even when she’s ostensibly getting down to business, suggesting techniques and recipes rather than reminiscing about road trips, her sentences are warm to the touch. In Blue Cheese & Walnuts, she first tells us to make a salad of crumbled Roquefort and walnuts and chicory. No quantities, no steps, no disquisitions on toasting nuts in a pan vs. the stove — we’re all grownups here. And then she writes: “Good dressed with olive oil, cider vinegar, and cream, 5:3:2, shaken up with seasoning.”

What I love, in this unassuming sentence, is the tone, the speed, the bustle. Good dressed with, rather than This salad is good dressed with — that absence of an object sketches the writer: she’s scribbling on the back of a receipt, her eyes occasionally darting to the side as she remembers which vinegar she uses. And then that ratio, dropped without explanation or grammatical welcome-mat — she trusts us to know that this is not a bible verse or a typographical error. 

To read is to reckon with an ever-adjusting portrait of the writer — her tone of voice, her mood, her level of intelligence. But to read is also to reckon with a portrait of the reader, of you — the self you see reflected in the writer’s glasses, so to speak. And the self I see when I read Segnit (capable, calm, sweater-sleeves pushed up) is one I like better than the self I see when I read a treatise on foolproof biscuits (anxious, obsessive, apron cinched tight).

All of which is to say that Segnit has, in this sentence, introduced life into what could very well have been a sterile moment, a transaction across a teller’s window. What I feel, reading Segnit, is the inverse of what I feel when I answer the phone and hear a robot warning me that my car insurance is about to expire. I feel accompanied; I feel cared for. I feel a human presence — writer, reader, 1:1.