The cookbooks that feed the soul

If you want a lifetime of inspiration and happy memories, collect poetry and cookbooks — one feeds the heart, the other both stomach and soul. During a recent spring clean of my bookshelves, I lingered over the cookbooks, recognising an internet-driven change in my habits: I now buy these for cooking prompts, good storytelling and tips on technique rather than for recipes that are often just a swift Google search away.

One of my favourite cookbooks this spring contains no recipes as we understand them. Niki Segnit’s widely anticipated follow-up to The Flavour Thesaurus (2010) continues her highly creative approach to food, which focuses on flavour pairings rather than recipes, and mixes scraps of culinary history with personal reflections. Through sumptuous, quirky prose, Segnit’s first volume used 99 basic flavours to hundreds of combinations — some familiar, such as chocolate and hazelnut or peanut and chicken, some revelatory, like chocolate and bacon or peanut and asparagus.

I have slowly been steered towards a more experimental approach by the cookery writers tapping into personal histories, family stories, culinary lore

Segnit’s new volume, The Flavour Thesaurus: More Flavours, is again structured by chapter groupings, such as “Creamy Fruity” or “Spicy Woody”, but the book has a plant-based focus. It introduces 66 new flavours, from miso and tamarind to elderberry and yuzu, and returns to 26 previously mentioned ingredients with renewed zest and fresh pairings. Nigella seeds have a light fragrance “vaguely reminiscent of primary schools, floor polish and milk”; elderflower and passion fruit might be too much like “wearing top-to-toe leopard skin”; honey can be “a bit earnest”, but cinnamon lures it out to play.

In The Flavour Thesaurus, Segnit asked: “Had I ever really learned to cook? Or was I just reasonably adept at following instructions?” Like her, I learnt to cook one recipe at a time, clutching on to that handrail rather than trusting my own instincts. But I have slowly been steered towards a more experimental approach by the increasing number of food and cookery writers tapping into personal histories, family stories, culinary lore: Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg’s The Flavour Bible (2008), for example, the popular Jeremy Lee’s Cooking: Simply and Well, for One Or Many (2022) and Maya Feller’s Eating from Our Roots (2023).

Publishing often takes unpredictable turns — in the early 2000s, some thought that a flood of online recipes would kill off cookbooks. But while it made end-to-end recipe collections less attractive, other types of cookery books have flourished. You can trace the gadget-driven nature of today’s kitchens, for instance, to many bestselling cookbooks, often written by star bloggers like Jeffrey Eisner (The Simple Comforts Step-by-Step Instant Pot Cookbook) or Gina Homolka (The Skinnytaste Air Fryer Cookbook). 

Other readers turn to food writing in search of clarity and expert guidance. “What the early proponents of Internet recipes could not have anticipated . . . was that the sheer volume of information might prove stultifying rather than democratizing,” wrote Ken Albala, a professor and author of food histories, and the culinary expert Christine Larson in their 2015 essay “The Evolution of Cookbooks in the Digital Age”. “Users now may find it virtually impossible to find and trust recipes of high quality: Google ‘lasagna recipes’ and more than a million choices come up.”

When I began cooking in my twenties, I leaned on a few classic recipe books — The Joy of Cooking, Marcella Hazan’s The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, all of Madhur Jaffrey’s work, plus my mother’s only published cookbook, 100 Recipes from Bengal — together with those modest publications known as family or community cookbooks. 

Today I’m drawn to the blend of family histories and reinvention found in a diverse range of cookbooks. They include two more books published this spring: Carolina Doriti’s Salt of the Earth: Secrets and Stories from a Greek Kitchen and Gurdeep Loyal’s collection of British-Indian flavours, Mother Tongue: Flavours of a Second Generation. “My food inheritance has been an ever-evolving musical score of flavour, a modulating manuscript of taste scribbled over by each new generation, never deleting what came before, but always leaving edible echoes of the past on the plates of the present,” Loyal, a London-based food consultant and author, writes. 

What these writers offer home cooks like me is a sense of greater freedom in the kitchen. My dining table is strewn with cookbooks — and also with fresh basil, celery, purple chillies, curry leaves and other produce from the roof garden. Taste, smell, texture, flavour: the best modern food writing is an invitation to follow your instincts.

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