Delicious blog

Nicky Segnit took on the daunting task of bringing together and classifying a variety of flavors and combinations under one cover. The author from the first pages does not pretend to be objective, because the choice of combinations of ingredients is in any case subjective. However, if you are no longer new to gastronomy, the book can be useful and curious. It categorizes tastes according to 16 different criteria, although there will certainly be intersections between sections.

The Thesaurus of Flavors is a list of the 99 most common foods that are suggested to be varied in various pairings. As a result, there were about 1000 flavor pairs. Some of them are commonplace, like combining cheese with red wine, while others are quite unusual, such as eggs and coconut, mangoes and shellfish or potatoes and peanuts, and some are completely undesirable – for example, blueberries with mushrooms.

Each section is preceded by something like a dictionary entry (but not as boring as it is sometimes accepted) with historical and geographical facts about the main product, for example, chocolate. And then follows a list of possible combinations, from a justifiably scientific or author’s point of view.

There are also recipes in the book, but they are presented in a very condensed form just to give the reader a hint of the options for combining ingredients.