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Hello and welcome to Table Talk, the Spectator's Food and Drink Podcast.

I'm Laura Prendergast.

And I'm Olivia Potts.

And today we're delighted to be joined by Nikki Segnott.

Nikki is the author of the hit cooking books, The Flavor Thesaurus and Lateral Cooking. After a career in advertising,

she shocked culinary fame with the Flavrethosaurus, winning multiple awards, including the Guild

of Food Writers Award for Best debut, and selling over 250,000 copies. Her fans include Nigella

Lawson, Hugh Fernley Whittingstool, and Heston Blumenthal, and her books are now a staple of

kitchens around the world, having been translated into 15 languages. Her latest book, The Flavour Thesaurus,

More Flavors, explores 92 primarily plant-based flavours. Nikki, welcome to Table Talk.

Hello, thank you for having me. Nicky, we're going to start where we always do at the beginning and ask you, what are your earliest memories of food?

Well, the very earliest, it's not necessarily a memory, but it's a story.

My mother tells me that when I was about two years old and she was chopping up some steak for a casserole,

I stood on the chair and fixed her with my little brown eyes and looked at the meat and then looked back at her and said, poor doggy.

She'd never felt the same about me.

Every time I cut, every little piece of steak up, I think, poor doggy.

Poor doggy.

Closely followed by my mother coming and finding me.

My mother's great, but she came and found me and said, she was really, really angry with me.

And she found that I had been,

...