Niki Segnit: “It all comes down to an essential greed to relive moments of happiness”

In a London company meeting room in the mid-2000s, a group of people seemed bored to death as they listened to overwhelmingly detailed reports comparing 26 different types of strawberry milkshakes.

However, one of them, from the part of the

marketing

team specialized in the development of food products, was fascinated, excited about each new information, she wanted to know more... Her name was Niki Segnit and it would not take long for her to leave that job to concentrate in writing a book that was intended to be a great unifying theory of flavors.

The goal was undoubtedly too ambitious, but along the way he gathered 99 foods and mixed them together until he found 980 pairs of combinations that work—from lobster with vanilla and blood sausage with chocolate to watermelon with oysters—and which he put together. with many doses of humor between recipe proposals, anecdotes and all kinds of cultural references.

So

The Encyclopedia of Flavors

(Debate, 2011) not only became a bestseller, but also a reference book for chefs around the world.

A few years later, in 2018, her confirmation came with

Cocina lateral,

in which the author gives tools to master different methods of cooking food and keys to the basic relationships of kinship between dishes.

Now she has just launched the second part of her flavor catalog, with the subtitle:

More combinations with vegetables, new recipes and delicious ideas.

Also published by Debate, this time there are 92 foods — mostly vegetables — and 800 combinations.

Choose one of the ones you like the most.

Honey and cheese.

You could sit down with a whole range of cheeses and honeys and some wines, perhaps, and some good bread, and give your palate a great pleasure, a journey and an adventure, because these ingredients are beautiful and very honest.

And one that was surprising.

One that I thought I was really going to hate was coffee and yogurt.

But I tried it and was very surprised that the yogurt, in this case Greek, gave the coffee a fruity flavor, almost like a smoked black currant.

It had flavors that I had never tried in yogurt, like toast, brown flavors that are associated with toast, caramel, chocolate... It was really something new and I liked it so much that I had it for breakfast every day for a whole month.

Has it happened to you a lot?

Sometimes.

Another example is green beans with cinnamon.

By combining the grassiness of the beans and the spiciness of the cinnamon, almost like a pesto, you get a completely different third thing.

That's what this book is about, dozens of ingredients, many of which you know, but have never connected with each other.

There are so many... Avocado, which you have always eaten salty, and suddenly you try it with honey... It's like discovering that it had a secret life.

It's like one of those

Choose Your Own Adventure children's books.

In the end it's about experimenting?

I think you can predict the result of a combination to a certain extent, but then it turns out that some molecule of the ingredients has a different effect [when combined with another] and you don't know if you're going to like it.

When you put the yogurt and cumin together, it tastes like a very fragrant French cheese.

And of course, if you like smelly French cheese like I do, then it's a great combination.

But if you're allergic to that kind of thing, you're going to want to run away.

It's fun, I guess.

Segnit (Hampshire, England, 57 years old) stopped by Madrid at the end of last year to promote the second part of his thesaurus of flavors.

Sitting at a table in a restaurant in the center of the city, she agrees to summarize her biography through her relationship with food.

She begins by talking about her family, who were not particularly well-off nor did they usually go to restaurants, but they really liked to eat and talk about food.

She then stops at a first big turning point, at age 17, when her sister told her she had to try a fabulous food she had discovered and took her to a kebab.

Niki vomited it as soon as she took the first bite.

“At that moment I became a vegetarian, it was just that I didn't want to eat meat,” she says.

That's where it all started, he says.

Her taste changed overnight.

She went from not liking vegetables to loving cabbages, turnips, and everything teenagers hate.

“It was like a switch flipped on me.”

Since her mother was not willing to prepare different dishes for her, she taught her to make pea soup, lentil and tomato soup, the same ones that she continues to make for her children today.

But when she became emancipated shortly after and moved to London, she began to live on “toast with beans, chips and all that kind of junk food that young people usually eat.”

At some point along the way, his body asked for meat again — “it was Christmas, I missed salami a lot” — and at 24 he decided that he wanted to get back to good food, the one his mother made, the

coq au vin,

the stews. French, sausage pie, Sunday roast beef… In fact, she started cooking using the same recipe book her mother had, a classic Marks & Spencer one — “very contemporary, with prawn cocktail and things like that.” ”—and then he expanded his repertoire: Indian, Asian, French food... But always following recipes, and he didn't like that.

Why don't you like following recipes?

The more I did it, the more I realized I wasn't actually learning anything.

I only copied, I only followed instructions, and what I wanted was to take off, start doing things that fit the idea of ​​being able to cook, of going to the market and buying ingredients that I like and turning them into a dish, without generating so much waste. like shopping every day for a different recipe, with things that accumulate and then are thrown away.

And how did you manage to navigate that change?

With cookbooks?

The truth is, no.

I guess it's more about putting the books in the drawer.

Although it is true that there are books to investigate concepts such as flavor, what is sour, what is sweet... That taught me to pay attention, to concentrate on what exactly things taste like.

And to take a risk, you can try and the result, even if it is not the best in the world every time, is not going to turn out so bad.

It is very rare that something is so bad that it ends up in the trash.

But even when I got a good understanding of flavors, I needed to understand shapes, proportions, basic ideas of how bread is made, how a cake is made, how cookies are made, what the basic mechanisms behind those things are.

That's what prompted me to write

Lateral Kitchen,

which was eight years of work.

That completely changed my ability to cook, because now I know exactly what to do.

I don't have to look for any references.

And the good thing is that, halfway through

Side Cooking,

I had twins and that obviously changed my life in the kitchen as well.

For example, now I wake up in the morning most weekends and I have to make pancakes.

And I know how to make them, that I need a pinch of salt, a cup of flour, another cup of milk, an egg... Before, I should have looked for a recipe, the measuring cup, because it wasn't in my head.

And there is a lot of that type of cooking in family life, of knowing how to do the basics without having to look for it, even if you are not entirely sure.

Have your studies, your work experience also helped you in this transition?

I left school at 18, I didn't pursue a career.

I worked at Southampton University Library.

I loved it.

It's what I still want to do: being a librarian is the best job in the world.

But I did it for a while and then I moved to London.

I worked for a few years as an assistant to a tax inspector.

Then, in advertising: he was in charge of photography and illustrations.

And later I moved into brand strategy.

But I got a little fed up with consulting for some brands, like banking, detergents... So I decided that I only wanted to work with food and beverage brands.

I was with Smirnoff, Baileys, Malibu, Coca-Cola, with mayonnaise... When you prepare strategies for these brands, you work in test kitchens, development kitchens, in sensory tests: I loved it.

Niki Segnit, in the restaurant of the Club Financiero Génova, in the center of Madrid. Ximena and Sergio

Have you always had that special interest in flavors?

My parents had an Italian friend, who was a chef, and one day we went to the forest.

He took a really good steak, cut it with green peppers, skewered it on skewers, and cooked it over high heat.

I must have been seven years old.

At first we ate a very good salami from Emilia-Romagna, where he was from.

And then we had these meat and green pepper skewers.

I was a very little girl, but I remember thinking it was so wonderful, so delicious, that I could eat it all the time.

Even now I can taste it in my memory.

That exact flavor.

From time to time I can try some meat that tastes like that and it is something wonderful, very pure.

We have all had that feeling at some point, and not all of us have set out to study it, to dissect it to understand it.

But if you are a curious person, you do ask yourself those things.

I think it all boils down, perhaps, to an essential greed for wanting to relive those moments of happiness.

Going out to eat at a restaurant and eating a salad with goat cheese, toasted hazelnuts and a raspberry vinaigrette for the first time, and thinking: “Wow, this is incredible.

“I have to go home and I have to do it.”

But you try it and it's not like the one at the restaurant, so you have to do it again.

And that vital desire for search is always there, as in love.

It's like you're always looking for those incredibly brilliant moments, which you want to repeat over and over again.

Probably in this answer lies the key to understanding Segnit's meticulous and almost obsessive working method, which includes everything from studying scientific research, interviewing chefs or reading anthropology manuals to watching recipe videos from some Hungarian grandmothers on YouTube and, of course, the tests with each combination.

Could you say that yours is a way of getting to know the world through flavors?

As for flavors taking you to different places and different writers… Yes, I think so.

Like when I'm researching buckwheat and apple, I come across this beautiful story by Hemingway [

The Great River of Two Hearts

] and I have to stop and read the whole book.

Not because I need more documentation for my work, but because it sounds so wonderful... And then I started Paris was a holiday because it has a lot of food, and I've already read that book four times this year.

And that's right, something that reaches you somewhere and sometimes you go around in circles...

It seems like a starting point as good as any other for getting to know the world, perhaps more beautiful than many others.

Yes, in a way, that's the good thing about food, right?

When I lost one of my jobs in advertising, I think I got fired, I didn't know what to do.

I had always worked since I was 18: I would get up and go to work.

And that first morning, June 1st, I woke up and, after 20 years, I had nowhere to go.

And I thought: this month I'm only going to eat Spanish food.

I will make Spanish recipes, I will cook Spanish things.

And I will read Spanish books, I thought, although I only read one, because Don

Quixote

took me all month.

I also watched a lot of movies and stuff like that.

But I wanted to immerse myself mainly through gastronomy.

I stuffed some squid for the first time, used a lot of ingredients and went looking for them in neighborhoods in London I had never been to.

The truth is that I had no desire to go back to work.

And now that you dedicate yourself to researching and writing about food, what is your relationship with work like?

Well, it's not exactly how I thought it would be.

No?

Because?

Don't know.

I guess I thought that if I made a living writing, I'd live in Paris, like Hemingway, in an attic, smoking... Working in the morning, going out and getting drunk in the afternoon, and living a very bohemian life.

And it is not like that.

Niki Segnit, portrayed in Madrid. Ximena and Sergio

How is?

I live with my husband and work from nine in the morning to five in the afternoon, or from nine to three when I pick up the children.

And my life is much less bohemian than perhaps I would like.

But seriously, it gives me a lot of pleasure.

When I wanted to be a librarian it was because I wanted to spend more time among books.

And I never thought I'd write one.

Nor would it make their jobs easier for such incredibly creative people.

What response to your books has made you most proud?

Obviously, it's great that chefs like Yotam Ottolenghi or Nigella Lawson say good things about you, it's wonderful.

But I also know that there are other very, very high-level chefs from restaurants around the world who really use the book.

In The

Bear series

[starring Jeremy Allen White, who plays a talented chef in Chicago]

The Encyclopedia of Flavors

has a fantastic role, and that made me feel like some kind of stage mom.

I was so proud, so excited!

Yesterday I gave a talk in Barcelona and a young guy, who wasn't a chef or anything, came up to me to sign his books and told me that he loves

Cocina lateral.

All praise is good and I love it.

I shouldn't, but I love it.

Why shouldn't I?

Oh, you know, because I'm English.

After everything he has researched and experienced, he sees a lot of crazy things from people trying to get their head around the hypersaturated world of gastronomy.

I believe that cooking is a creative act and people have to find themselves.

You may have to go the wrong way or copy until you figure out who you are.

Of course there are things I don't like, I would be happy if I never smelled truffle oil again.

But it's probably better to celebrate the people who do it really well.

I'm much more worried about people losing the beautiful connection they have to their food culture in countries like Spain and Italy, seeing too much sushi, too much

poke,

things that look exactly the same here and in my country.

That is, are you more concerned about standardization than crazy attempts?

Yes Yes Yes.

I simply think that it is very important to maintain quality artisanal food and our own culinary culture, perhaps because I come from a country that has stopped having it, although that is interesting in its own way, with that kind of landscape of international cuisine.

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