Lateral Cooking: One Dish Leads to Another

Lateral Cooking is practical handbook, designed to help creative cooks develop their own recipes. It is based around a set of recipes which, once you're familiar with them, will prove almost infinitely adaptable, according to whatever is in your fridge, in season, on offer at the market, or you feel like making. These 'starting points' are arranged on twelve continuums—bread, chocolate, custard, and so on—and the transition from one recipe to the next generally amounts to a tweak or two in the method or ingredients. So once you've got the hang of flatbreads, for instance, the recipes further along the continuum—crackers, soda bread, scones—will involve the easiest adjustment. With any luck, these starting points will help you become the kind of cook I've always wanted to be—the kind that can tug down a bowl and get cracking on a dish whose precise quantities and combination of ingredients might vary each time I made it. An instinctive cook, in short.