'Mandy Aftel's latest work with Daniel Patterson is a masterpiece on the science of cooking from an olfactory and culinary perspective through the same lens. This book is a must for any chef or cook looking to find new inspirations and a deeper understanding of the way flavours work together.' Pratap Chahal (@thathungrychef), Flavour Bastard, Soho, London 'Am counting down the days till your book arrives!' Nigella Lawson Daniel Patterson, a chef, and Mandy Aftel, a perfumer, present a revolutionary new approach to creating delicious, original food. Aftel and Patterson are rock stars in their respective fields: Patterson has won two Michelin stars for his San Francisco restaurant Coi and numerous James Beard and other food awards, and his new path-breaking co-venture Loco'l is attracting national interest; Aftel has been profiled in the New York Times T Magazine and other publications and is constantly featured and quoted in magazines and blogs. In a world awash with cooking shows, food blogs and recipes, the art of flavour has been surprisingly neglected. The multibillion-dollar flavour industry practises its dark arts by manipulating synthetic ingredients, and home cooks are taught to wield the same blunt instruments: salt, acid, sugar, heat. But foods in their natural states are infinitely more nuanced than the laboratory can replicate - and offer far greater possibilities for deliciousness. Chef Daniel Patterson and natural perfumer Mandy Aftel are experts at orchestrating ingredients, and here they teach readers how to make the most of nature's palette. The Art of Flavour proceeds not by rote formula but via a series of mind-opening and palate-expanding tools and concepts: using a flavour 'compass' to find the way to transformative combinations of aromatic ingredients; pairing ingredients to make them 'bury' (control) one another and 'lock' (achieve an alchemy that transcends the sum of the parts); learning to deploy cooking methods for maximum effect; and the seven 'dials' that allow a cook to fine-tune a dish. With more than sixty recipes that allow the cook to grasp each concept and put it into practice, The Art of Flavour is food for the imagination that will help cooks at any level to become flavour virtuosos in their own right. From The Flavour Bible on, flavour has been a particular focus of recent interest, but no one has Patterson's and Aftel's unique perspective on it, their combined expertise, or their winning blend of ideas, information, recipes and cooking and perfuming lore. The Art of Flavour is a thinking person's cookbook that uses recipes to instil principles for creating delicious food at home, larded with fascinating information on the history and science of flavour that make it a great armchair read as well.

Breathe in the natural and cultural history of scent with this richly illustrated book inspired by the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents. Mandy Aftel is one of the world’s leading bespoke perfumers, with a clientele ranging from the singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen to Sir Jony Ive, the former chief design officer of Apple. Eschewing the synthetic molecules that dominate commercial perfumes, Aftel creates her complex and subtle fragrances using only natural essences. For her, each of these essences is a gateway to a lost world of scent, stretching back to the beginnings of human civilisation and intertwined with the history of medicine, cuisine, adornment, sexuality, and spirituality. In 2017, Aftel opened a one-room museum — the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents — in her backyard in Berkeley, California, to help a modern audience rediscover the enchantment of this lost world. Her museum has attracted thousands of enthusiastic visitors and has been featured in the New York Times, Vogue, Goop, O: The Oprah Magazine, and numerous other media outlets. Now Aftel has created this beautiful book, illustrated with treasures from her museum’s collection, so that readers at home can immerse themselves in the world of scent. She guides us through the different families of botanical fragrances (including flowers, woods, leaves and grasses, and resins), depicting each plant with a hand-coloured antique woodcut and revealing its olfactory notes and lore. Special chapters are devoted to the most rare and precious fragrances — such as ambergris, formed of a rare secretion of the sperm whale — and to antique essential oil bottles, handwritten recipe books, and other evocative artefacts. The Museum of Scent, which includes a bookmark subtly scented with a natural essence, invites us on a sensuous, imaginative journey.

Is your life a page-turner? A yawner? A cliched story you're tired of repeating? Every life is a story, says therapist Mandy Aftel, but the story of your life doesn't have to read like a bad novel, filled with guilt, anger, and hopelessness that limit your understanding of the past and close off possibilities for the future. Even ordinary lives have the elements of great literature, and we can revise trite or destructive story lines to craft a new narrative of courage, fulfillment, and imagination. Using examples from literature and life and a range of imaginative thinking and writing exercises, Aftel guides us in the creation of an artful existence, full of the complexity, insight, and excitement of a great novel.