One of the key factors in the development of a dish is more often than not left out. Presentation, luxury ingredients and classic combinations are considered more important than the foundation of the dish - taste. Sybil Kapoor's new book, Taste, in my opinion decants many years of study and experimentation and is what I can only describe as ahead of its time.
She has put together a fine book that encompasses the five key tastes - sour, salt, bitter, sweet and chilli - offering different vehicles of delivery associated with each taste sensation. Not only does she identify specific ingredients with the key notes, she explains how in certain combinations they can enhance and highlight each other.
This is not a recipe book, it's a guide, scale, a tool if you like, to compose your own dishes using the fundamental foundation of taste. I believe professional chefs will find the book easier to use than the home cook, but once the home cook understands the basic foundations, he/she will be in a better position to create not only their own food style, but their own flavour sensations.
Chefs will look at dishes and the food before the text, and my very first impressions of the book as a chef were a little dismissive because the photography's straightforward and the recipes pretty basic. But don't let this fool you. Look through the dishes and identify what Kapoor is trying to achieve, then transfer her thought processes to your own individual style. I'm sure you'll find the results will be surprising.
Although to me the book is very exciting, it's not without flaws. After 30 or so pages I felt the reference to the five taste sensations, comparing one with another, enhancing and highlighting different notes, could be a little confusing. Kapoor builds dishes by taste notes, not ingredients, and this, to some, may seem alien as chefs have traditionally always adopted commodities or ingredients to build a dish.
I feel the only thing missing in the book is a quick reference scale of flavour notes and sensations. As there are many combinations of taste notes working with each other producing different results, a quick reference diagram on the outcome of combinations would be helpful and make the book complete.
In British cooking today one of the missing ingredients is true flavour combination. There is too much generic food around and, dare I say it, in some of the country's top restaurants flavours are two-dimensional, offering functional food with no depth. The thought processes in Kapoor's Taste would go some way to bridging this void in our industry.
John Campbell, executive chef, the Vineyard at Stockcross, Reading, Berkshire
Taste
Sybil Kapoor
£20 Mitchell Beazley
ISBN 1-84000-610-2