Cookbooks tend to make better models than teachers. Follow a recipe for roasted chicken Provençal to a tee and you’re likely to end up with something tasty—you might even end up with a dish as sumptuous-looking as the one pictured—but you might not learn much about why it’s tasty: why the ingredients, in the particular combinations and amounts advised, produce such lip-smackingly good flavors.
That problem is taken up by Daniel Patterson and Mandy Aftel in their book The Art of Flavor (Riverhead, Aug.), which aims to teach readers why certain ingredients, when put together, taste good, and thus to enable them to create their own flavors without the guidance of recipes. The idea, said Aftel, is to get readers to a place where they “no longer use cookbooks.”
Aftel is an artisanal perfumer—her company, Aftelier Perfumes, which has been in business for more than 20 years, sells scents, sprays, teas, and other products—and has written on food for publications including The New York Times and Gourmet. Patterson, a chef, has founded several Bay Area restaurants, including Coi, which has two Michelin stars.
InThe Art of Flavor the authors take an almost scientific approach to taste. The book includes several principles and guidelines, such as the Four Rules for Creating Flavor. “If you have ingredients that are very similar, you need something to differentiate them; if you have two ingredients that are far apart, you need something to connect them; if you have a dish that’s too light, you need to ground it; and if you have a dish that’s too heavy, you need to lift it,” Patterson explained. The book also features a Flavor Compass, seven “dials” for fine-tuning dishes, and even some vocabulary from the world of perfume: “burying,” which refers to the process of suppressing a strong flavor, and “locking,” which is “when two or more flavors come together and create something either different or bigger than they were then they started,” according to Aftel.
Showing readers the principles of flavor—the chemistry behind how it works—can embolden them to experiment with less familiar combinations, the authors added. Everyone knows that tomato and basil go well together, but few home cooks would think to pair tomatoes with cinnamon. “It’s phenomenal,” Aftel said. Understanding “the facets of cinnamon and the facets of tomatoes” allows home cooks to stray from the “basil-and-tomato footsteps.”
Patterson says his and Aftel’s goal is to “create a system, or a structure, that will allow home cooks to see relationships in a way they couldn’t see them before. These are things chefs do intuitively.”
Aftel added that actively experimenting with flavors, rather than passively following recipes, can making cooking more pleasurable. The idea, she said, is to give readers a sense of mastery—“a feeling of ‘God, I know what I’m doing. This is really fun.’”