Cookbook Profile: Taste, A New Way to Cook

Taste
A New Way to Cook

by Sybil Kapoor

Taste
As good food has become a fashionable and complicated pursuit, it is easy to forget that cooking is really about the successful combination of five elementary tastes—sour, salt, umami (savory), bitter and sweet. In our rush to admire complex dishes that are rarely produced in the home kitchen, we can lose sight of the fact that there is nothing better than well-prepared food made from the best ingredients.

In Taste: A New Way to Cook, two-time Glenfiddich award winner Sybil Kapoor pursues her own obsession with taste. Each chapter explores how tastes are like a palette of primary colours, beginning with recipes for drinks and soups to demonstrate how just two or three tastes combine. As the chapter develops, so do the combinations and possibilities. There is also a chapter on flavours and chilies.

To create this comprehensive exploration of taste, Kapoor discarded her inhibitions and sampled such delights as coffee with salt. The result is a guide that teaches you why lamb marinated in sour lemon and bitter saffron tastes sweet, while a pinch of salt transforms a sugary, coconut black rice pudding into a lighter, more tempting dish.

Simple, fresh food is Sybil's passion, and in Taste she provides a new approach to cooking with over 150 recipes and ideas that will enable you to create your own sensational dishes. Exqusitely photographed and packed with delicious dishes, Taste offers a new way to cook.

About the Author

"Strip away excess ingredients and you become aware of the true taste of what you are eating, and it is a simple and deeply pleasurable step to create delicious food by adding a hint of this taste or that to create amazing dishes." (Sybil Kapoor: The Guardian, April 27, 2003)

Sybil Kapoor is a respected food writer who is renowned around the world. Along with her pop BBC Radio series "Forbidden Fruit and Vegetables", which won the 2002 Glenfiddich Radio Programme Award, she writes regularly for the Independent, Observer Magazine, and House & Garden. She is also contributing editor and the lead cookery writer for Waitrose Food Illustrated. In 2002, Sybil also won the prestigious Glenfiddich Magazine Cookery Writer of the Year Award.

Sybil was formerly the sous chef at Jam's restaurant in New York and head chef at Sally Clarke's in London. She has two previous books: Modern British Food and the award-winning Simply British.

Buy the Book!

Taste
A New Way to Cook
by Sybil Kapoor
Photographs: David Loftus
Whitecap
208 pp., $29.95
Colour photographs throughout
Softcover with French flaps
ISBN: 1552855414
Information provided by the publisher.