You have three ingredients, the additional being chicken fat. Excuse me Niki, but you correctly specify to leave the skin on chicken thighs. One idea caught my eye for chicken: the author paired it with sweet bell peppers, and is impressed by the rich saucy dish those two ingredients can make. It really is most akin to an American Heritage dictionary, in that it's mostly lists, with the odd illustration, chart, or usage note (but in the cookbook, those additions are just text). I could not study the 'color wheel' as I could not process/ understand it, and I am not motivated to read all the fine print stories interspersed with the lists of pairings. But the author and I do not organize ideas in complementary ways, and we taste and eat very differently.

I really wanted something that would guide me to understand patterns, create new templates, visualize & predict what's likely to work or not. Beautifully packaged, The Flavour Thesaurus is not only a highly useful, and covetable, reference book for cooking - it might keep you up at night reading. There are nearly a thousand entries in all, with 200 recipes and suggestions embedded in the text. You can expect to find traditional pairings such as pork & apple, lamb & apricot, and cucumber & dill contemporary favourites like chocolate & chilli, and goat's cheese & beetroot and interesting but unlikely-sounding couples including black pudding & chocolate, lemon & beef, blueberry & mushroom, and watermelon & oyster. Within these sections it follows the form of Roget's Thesaurus, listing 99 popular ingredients alphabetically, and for each one suggesting flavour matchings that range from the classic to the bizarre. The book is divided into flavour themes including Meaty, Cheesy, Woodland and Floral Fruity. Ever wondered why one flavour works with another? Or lacked inspiration for what to do with a bundle of beetroot? The Flavour Thesaurus is the first book to examine what goes with what, pair by pair.

The flavour thesaurus review