At a recent symposium on sustainability, the moderator queried a panel of bartenders about their favorite bartending books. I’ve heard the question posed many times through the years, but one bartender’s unequivocal response that day reminded me how often the answer is the same. Shockingly, the book isn’t about cocktails or bartending techniques at all.
Originally published in 2008, Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg’s book “The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide To Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America’s Most Imaginative Chefs” has quietly reached cult status within the bar industry. The 392-page tome, which hit shelves during the embryonic stages of the cocktail revolution, was originally designed to encourage chefs and home cooks to develop better instincts by deepening their understanding of flavor combinations.
“Bar books are more about telling you how to be a bartender, the craft and ethic of bartending,” says Leila Miller, the bartender at the symposium who cited the book as her favorite. “But with ‘The Flavor Bible,’ you’re constantly using it for different things.”
Through the years, craft bartenders like Miller have embraced the way the book trains them to approach cocktail design with a chef’s mindset. In the absence of a definitive resource for how to harness the power of flavor in cocktails, Page and Dornenburg’s book has become canon for modern mixologists.
A New Paradigm for Exploring Flavor
According to the book’s preface, “The Flavor Bible” is “a comprehensive, easy-to-use single-volume reference of more than 600 alphabetical entries listing modern-day compatible
