Mandy Aftel – författare

'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 LawsonDaniel 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.

"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." — 7 x 7 "Aftel, ... explores the natural and cultural history of scent in her newest book, The Museum of Scent."— Veranda"A beautiful book about beautiful things, with a fascinating narrative told by an author who loves her subject."— Kirkus Reviews"It is so rich in story, information, and images, you don't just read it, you fall into it and don’t want it to end!" — Ivy Ross, co-author of New York Times bestseller Your Brain on Art and VP of Hardware Design at Google"...just leafing through Aftel’s stunning compilation of olfactory magic is like being gifted a book of secrets." — SmithsonianBreathe in the natural and cultural history of scent with this richly illustrated book inspired by the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents.“This work . . . is a true original ― a rarest of rare legacy volume. This book was created by a beautiful elder who is a polymath: meaning, a highly unique person of multiple modern and old ways of knowing. . . . Mandy Aftel’s dons and talents are now resting in your hands in this magical tome that, I deeply sense and hope, will bless you time and again.” ― From the foreword by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés Reyés, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves and the forthcoming La Curandera, Walking in Two WorldsMandy Aftel is one of the world’s preeminent natural perfumers, with a clientele ranging from the singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen to Ivy Ross, head of hardware design at Google. 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 civilization 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-colored 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 artifacts. The Museum of Scent, which includes a bookmark subtly scented with a natural essence, invites us on a sensuous, imaginative journey.

Discover the esoteric insights and enchanting imagery of the Baroque emblem book, a long-lost cousin of the tarot.The emblem book, which reached the peak of its popularity in the 16th and 17th centuries, presented mysterious allegorical images—rather like those we now find on tarot cards—alongside Latin mottoes. A learned text explained the connection between image and motto, and the lessons each emblem held for the reader’s life. Drawing on sources such as medieval bestiaries and Aesop’s fables, emblem books reflected an enchanted view of nature in which our human lives were intertwined with plants, animals, the moon and the stars. World-renowned natural perfumer Mandy Aftel first encountered emblem books in the course of her researches into antique botanical illustrations, and quickly became entranced. Here she presents 100 emblems from perhaps the finest emblem book, the Symbolorum et Emblematum of Camerarius, originally published in four parts between 1590 and 1604. Aftel has sensitively tinted in watercolour the bewitching circular engravings of the Symbolorum, in which giant hands reach from the sky; lions, bears, and unicorns gambol; and distant spires beckon. The mottoes and explanatory texts are given in translation from the original Latin, along with Aftel’s own commentary. An illustrated introduction illuminates the history and magic of emblem book. Symbolorum will be a treasure for anyone who is drawn to uncover ancient wisdom and feel the breath of the universe.