Lateral Cooking: One Dish Leads to Another

by Niki Segnit, Yotam Ottolenghi (Foreword)

A groundbreaking handbook--the "method" companion to its critically acclaimed predecessor, The Flavor Thesaurus-- with a foreword by Yotam Ottolenghi.

Niki Segnit used to follow recipes to the letter, even when she'd made a dish a dozen times. But as she tested the combinations that informed The Flavor Thesaurus , she detected the basic rubrics that underpinned most recipes. Lateral Cooking offers these formulas, which, once readers are familiar with them, will prove infinitely adaptable.

The book is divided into twelve chapters, each covering a basic culinary category, such as "Bread," "Stock, Soup & Stew," or "Sauce." The recipes in each chapter are arranged on a continuum, passing from one to another with just a tweak or two to the method or ingredients. Once you've got the hang of flatbreads, for instance, then its neighboring dishes (crackers, soda bread, scones) will involve the easiest and most intuitive adjustments. The result is greater creativity in the Lateral Cooking encourages improvisation, resourcefulness, and, ultimately, the knowledge and confidence to cook by heart.

Lateral Cooking is a practical book, but, like The Flavor Thesaurus , it's also a highly enjoyable read, drawing widely on culinary science, history, ideas from professional kitchens, observations by renowned food writers, and Segnit's personal recollections. Entertaining, opinionated, and inspirational, with a handsome three-color design, Lateral Cooking will have you torn between donning your apron and settling back in a comfortable chair.

Genres: Cookbooks, Food, Cooking, Nonfiction, Reference, Food and Drink, Foodie

612 pages, Hardcover

Published November 5, 2019

About the author

Niki Segnit had not so much as peeled a potato until her early twenties, when, almost by accident, she discovered that she loved cooking. Much as she enjoys haute cuisine, she’s not likely to reproduce it at home, preferring to experiment with recipes from domestic kitchens abroad. Her background is in marketing, specialising in food and drink, and she has worked with many famous brands of confectionary, snacks, baby foods, condiments, dairy products, hard liquors and soft drinks. Since summer 2010 she has written a weekly column on food combinations for The Times. She lives in central London with her husband.

Reviews

[Soph]

Perhaps the most useful and readable food book I own. An absolute delight from start to finish.

[Toni]

This book close to fundamentally changed my way of cooking and is still one of the books I regularly use. Riding on a wave of cookbooks the last decade oriented more towards process, Segnit follows up on her already mind-blowing Flavor Thesaurus with this cornucopia of dishes. It's like deconstructing 90% of modern home cooking. After working through this book, even just some of it, you will never read and use another cookbook the same way.

Even if I go by another book, I often have this one next by to understand the logic (the book is basically a collection of canonical dishes in their most abstract form and then with all the variations listed as text).

The secret to cookbooks and recipes is that it actually takes skill to cook by the book. Most of the times, you miss one ingredients and need to replace it with something, you are short on time and need to cut a corner etc. Recipes are blueprints, so there's always a translation going on. This book shows the many ways ingredients can be replaced, how there's always leeway in a dish, and how just the smallest changes can take you into new territory. Especially the last part is where creativity can happen. You will find yourself inventing novel dishes, just by applying the logic from this book, with surprising results.

Did I say that Niki Segnit is probably one of the most hilarious and funny food writers out there? We literally laughed out loud reading random passages from this one together at home.

As the scope of the book is not Eurocentric at all, and is actually very straight forward, I would recommend this as top 3 cookbook for any cook who wants to become better, more educated and inspired in the kitchen.

[Lucyfedia]

If all of my cookbooks were on fire, this is the one I would burn my hands for. My new favourite and I would recommend it to anyone who is comfortable enough cooking to break away from the traditional recipe layout and bend the rules.

It’s a genius way of helping people develop an instinct for what differentiates two very similar dishes on a spectrum and hence know how they can push and experiment with it.

Everything I have made from it has worked beautifully, the recipes are so simple.

Extra points for the writing style, which is both sassy and hilarious.

[Robin Steins]

Great cookbook! A treasure box of recipes and culinary knowledge. Author Niki Segnit has a great sense of humour: her witty writings made me laugh out loud several times.

[Md: Amjad]

★★★★★Lateral Cooking is a brilliant and refreshing approach to understanding food. Instead of simply presenting recipes to follow, it explains the relationships between ingredients, techniques, and variations, making cooking feel much more intuitive and creative. I especially enjoyed how one basic preparation can lead naturally to several different dishes, giving the book a wonderfully practical and flexible structure. The writing is clear, thoughtful, and genuinely inspiring, while the recipes encourage experimentation rather than perfection. This is the kind of cookbook that can change the way you think about cooking and help build confidence in the kitchen. A fascinating, useful, and deeply rewarding read for both curious beginners and experienced home cooks. Five stars!


Lateral Cooking is an inspiring and wonderfully thoughtful cookbook that completely changes the way you approach recipes. Instead of simply following instructions, it teaches you to understand the relationships between ingredients and techniques, making it easier to adapt, experiment, and create with confidence. I especially loved how the book encourages curiosity in the kitchen rather than treating cooking as a rigid formula. The explanations are clear, practical, and genuinely useful, while the recipes provide plenty of opportunities to build on what you learn. This is the kind of cookbook that becomes more valuable the more you use it. It has helped me think differently about cooking and feel much more comfortable improvising. A brilliant resource for curious home cooks who want to understand not just what to cook, but why it works. Absolutely deserving of five stars.

[Mike]

This book has an interesting premise which attracted me immediately. Rather than thinking of world food as discrete points, it looks at it as a giant possibility space in which multiple recipes are connected by what they have in common, but distinguished by slight differences in ingredients or techniques. So, for example, there's a basic bread recipe that more or less applies everywhere, but you can vary the flour, vary the hydrating ingredient, add different kinds of rising agents, take different approaches to how it's proofed, and cook it different ways, and this gives you everything from flatbreads and crackers through soda bread to yeasted bread all the way to babas.

It's an ambitious approach, and unfortunately the execution, for me, didn't quite support its usefulness as well as I would have liked. It really needs to be an app, rather than a book. If it's going to be a book, it needs to not require quite so much flipping back and forth between the base recipe and the variations; for example, if you're telling me that you can "use a 50/50 mix of warmed plain yogurt and milk for the liquid," it would be nice not to have to find my way back to the base recipe (especially in a Kindle edition that isn't as easy as it might be to navigate) to remind myself how much liquid that is. I resorted in the end to writing everything out by hand in a notebook. (I then decided to stick with my simpler, tried-and-true no-knead bread recipe, but that's another matter.)

Definitely an interesting idea, and I will dip into it again, I think, but not the perfect execution.

[Mary]

One of the funniest cookbooks I ever read. I was laughing out loud. It’s a great book for reading about food and Segnit does a great job of taking cooks through a basic approach to a food and showing how other foods relate to it. There are some fully written recipes with all kinds of great substitutions or variations but most of the book is like an encyclopedia with embedded recipes in food entries. So, for example, in the potato gnocchi entry Segnit tells you about the flour potato weight and add flour in patient increments but there is no explicit recipe. It’s a great book for cooks who want to know more and aren’t looking specifically for a big book of recipes.

[Nelleke Groot]

Dit is een kookopleiding in boekvorm. Een standaardwerk voor iedere beginnende én ervaren kok. Hoe maak je brood, wat is de basis voor saus? Maar daar blijft het niet hij. Op een vermakelijke manier laat Segnit je zien hoe gerechten ‘werken’ en hoe je zelf kunt gaan experimenteren, bedenken en ontdekken. Spelen met eten, hoera! Samen met de onvolprezen smaakbijbel heb je geen andere kookboeken meer nodig.

[Loz]

Really enjoyed this! It's goal is to teach the reader method and technique and then skills to riff on that with whatever is available. A true understanding of fundamentals of cooking, to then go play. A unique layout, heavy on words, low on pictures, allows the reader to focus on learning. A great tool, well constructed with joy.

[Ellen]

Bridges cooking with humor in a compendium in a very Leonardo daVinci way. From A to B to C to D, she takes you on a deliciously wild ride. Well worth reading the book for the reading alone. Adopting her thought process will, no doubt, make you a more interesting cook.

[Kat]

Am I the amalgamation of Elizabeth David/ Rene Redzepi / Hunter S Thompson yet?
Kind of preferred The Flavour Thesaurus to this one (not a criticism in an way) but as a ginger fiend, took to the ginger loaf like a fish to water (the recipe is delicious).

[Dray]

Although the recipes are fairly conventional this book did make me think. By grouping and linking techniques and outcomes the authors wends their way through a wide array of dishes and presents connections I had not made. I enjoyed the book.

[Nick Sanders]

A wonderful addition to her Flavour Thesaurus, and a novel way of looking at food and at cooking.

[Jennifer]

Great cook book, one of those rare gems that teaches you about cooking rather than just giving recipes.

[Kara]

Fascinating concept. The humour was annoying at times.

[Debbie Halls-Evans]

Niki Seignt does it again a great book that allows you to think wiser in the kitchen and writes a great story too

[Christa Maurice]

Fascinating book, but it really needs to be read in print. You're going to want to flip through it.

[Roy Kenagy]

FRANKLIN 641.5 SE :: READ0 / PURCHASE :: EXAMINED 12/05/2019 :: DISCURSIVE ENTRIES THAT ARE STRAIGHTFORWARD & INFORMED

[Jean MacLeod]

A wonderful endearing book. Definitely worth having in one's cookbook collection. I loved it.

[Schopflin]

I read this cover to cover and loved it, frequently laughing out loud. If you liked The Flavour Thesaurus you will like this and, like this, I expect to be using recipes from it in the future.

[Tina]

skimmed through as it's just so dense and not easy to navigate. Nice illustrations but wish it had more pictures and less content (or was broken into separate volums)

[Juli Anna]

I applaud the innovative form of this cookbook, but it's not the right book for me at this point in my life.

[Riegs]

I get the concept, but The Flavor Thesaurus is still 1000 times better. I really don't care when and where an author ate a dish.

[Jasmin Shi]

Borrowed from the library but will be buying a copy in the future along with other Segnit titles.

[Martyna]

świetny podręcznik, w którym autorka tłumaczy intuicyjne gotowanie i to, jak połączone są ze sobą różne dania (z całego świata) i smaki.

[Babette Plaisted`]

PHENOMENAL!! Can I go higher than five stars?
The lack of photos and pen and ink sketches throughout are so calming and charming. If you are addicted to getting recipes with flashing pictures in your peripheral, I say…free yourself from that bondage! It was so refreshing to go to the cookie section and see a chatty paragraph on biscotti, with simple, intuitive instructions. No rabid advertisers screaming at me, or inane text clogging up the page so I can be screamed at further. Nope, none of that rubbish. Yay!
She doesn't cover every topic, but pretty close! Because of my obsession with this book I noticed vinegar based sauces were missing. If she ever does an expanded edition, after vinaigrettes could be an arrow to relish then pickles. (I already penciled it in my copy) The only critique would be the index is not fully comprehensiive. Some recipes are not listed and it would be nice if the countries referenced had a heading so as to find their recipes easily.
The best cookbook I have ever read. I say read intentionally. I picked this for my family book club, buying copies for all. They merely scratched the surface, and eight months later my sister calls me to say she IS still reading it, but “I gotta say, I think you overestimated us”. So there you go, this book is a tome to live up to.
The text is engaging, funny, and full of insights into food AND human nature. I have underlining and circles and notes on almost every page. The depth of research and charming writing are worth so much more than the price of the book. This is a treasure I will keep mining for years to come.

[zeke]

A simple, but a genius idea of a book on cooking, 10/10 wholeheartedly recommend. The writing style is very fun too— although the authors British references make no sense to me.

[Patricia]

Niki Segnit is fun to spend time with. The first time I borrowed it, I just read it and it really got me thinking.

Second time I tried recipes, and while they were good I didn't find the book as engaging.

[Priscila Villalobos]

I baked brioche many times thanks to the advice on this book. I was surprised when I found that pan de muerto and conchas, a traditional mexican bread, is an orange scented brioche! Here you can start with the fundamentals of each type of bread, sauce, pastry, dressings ... and decide your leeway.