In his book Catching Fire, Richard Wrangham proposed that it is cooking that makes us human, or separates us from the beasts. That's as may be; but you could also argue that it is our tendency to mix ingredients that is the copper-bottomed sign of conscious intelligence.

It's certainly an impression that's reinforced by this superb book, which is not so much a cookbook as an inventory of human inspiration. Or, indeed, even of divine inspiration. Segnit has used a very apt quotation from John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure as her epigraph: "Lamb and apricots are one of those combinations which exist together in a relation that is not just complementary but that seems to partake of a higher order of inevitability  a taste which exists in the mind of God." Lanchester's narrator goes on to list such combinations as bacon and eggs, rice and soy sauce, strawberries and cream, port and Stilton . . . you get the idea, and it is a very good one.

I have not counted the number of flavour pairings in this book; in her introduction, Segnit says there are 4,851 possible combinations given her decision to restrict herself to 99 separate flavours (a number which she admits is arbitrary, but is certainly good enough for our purposes).

The key word in her subtitle is "creative". So not only will you find an entry for "Bacon and egg", you will find one for "Globe artichoke and mint": "The seriousness of globe artichoke is lightened by mint," she says, and with that "seriousness" you know you are in the hands of someone who can write persuasively about that most personal of senses, taste. As you cannot write with scientific objectivity about taste without risking dullness (although Harold McGee, cited frequently by Segnit, manages to avoid it in his On Food and Cooking), the best approach is anecdotal, and this is where Segnit's book is elevated beyond mere usefulness to delight  she doesn't always give recipes with her entries, but when she does they are both simple and inspirational.

Even if you know your 4,851 flavour pairings backwards to the point of ennui, or, conversely, have no intention whatsoever of cooking anything in your life, this is still a book that can be read for pleasure alone. It is as if she has made up her mind to do with her prose what her book invites us to do: to make combinations which both surprise and work. At which point, it is perhaps best to let lengthy quotation give you the true flavour of her book. Take this, her entry for "Coriander leaf and lime":

The first time I ordered Vietnamese beef and coriander noodle soup, a wedge of lime turned up in it, I put it to one side and left it there, grinning at me as it leaked tangy beef stock into my paper napkin. Lime, I thought, is sweet. Bear in mind I was brought up on Rose's lime cordial and its matching alien-plasma marmalade: sweet and then some. The more I ate Vietnamese and Thai food, the more lime began to turn up in savoury dishes, most often in partnership with coriander. It wasn't long before I was ordering dishes simply because they came with lime and coriander, which is a bit like buying a song because you like the backing vocals, and no worse a habit for that. Coriander and lime are the wooh woohs in "Sympathy for the Devil"  completely and utterly indispensable.

This is Segnit's technique at its best: anecdotal, charming (her admittance of a non-foodie childhood), generous ("no worse a habit for that"), and in the end sublime. It would not have occurred to me, in a thousand years, to compare coriander and lime to the wooh woohs in "Sympathy for the Devil", but I doubt now I will be able to taste them together without thinking of the song.

I have only the most insignificant of quibbles, and only two of them at that. I am not sure whether coriander leaf can be described as "zesty" on page 196 and "earthy" on page 197 without a certain cognitive dissonance; and I recall Marinetti's futurist dinner, to be eaten to the sound of an aeroplane motor and Bach, as consisting of fish with liver wrapped round it (quite revolting, since you ask), not the kumquat, black olive and fennel combo she mentions  but I dare say her word is better than mine on this. There is certainly an impressively wide frame of reference to her writing, and if there are any instances of archness or pseudishness, they must have passed me by, for everything here is just right.

Here is a marvellous idea for a book: a "thesaurus" of different flavour combinations. Former marketing executive Niki Segnit has taken 99 flavours (from potato and cucumber to black pudding and washed-rind cheese) and grouped them into hundreds of pairings, each accompanied by an elegant, and often highly witty, mini-essay. In one sense Segnit is telling us nothing new, since flavour combinations are something we all know about: why else would we chose to eat cheese and onion crisps, or mustard with ham? But she fleshes out our understanding of such classic pairings, informing us, for instance, that "the most English combination" of beef and horseradish actually originated in Germany. At the same time she enlarges our sense of the possibilities of flavour-combining. Coffee and goat's cheese? Who would have thought it, but apparently Norwegians eat a cheese called ekte gjetost on crispbread with coffee.

The field of flavour analysis suffers from a fundamental ambiguity: is it primarily a scientific or aesthetic enterprise? One of the delights of Segnit's book is the way it combines an air of empirical exactitude with something more loose-limbed and poetic. Here she is on chocolate and cardamom: "Like a puppeteer's black velvet curtain, dark chocolate is the perfect smooth background for cardamom to show off its colours." No doubt there are more rigorous ways to explain the compatibility of these ingredients, but I doubt they'd be half as satisfying. Ultimately, discussions of flavour (as opposed to taste, which is a much narrower thing) have to rely on metaphor, since the main way we identify flavours is by comparing them with other things. Happily, Segnit is blessed with an ear for figurative language. "All citrus fruit," she writes, "lead double lives, the flavour of their juices being quite different from that of their peel." She describes the taste of grapefruit as "standoffish", which perfectly captures its zingy astringency.

At the same time, she doesn't stint on the science. She is quite prepared to get into the nitty-gritty of the chemical basis of grapefruit's oddness (all to do with mercaptan and nootkatone, apparently) and throughout the book displays impressive learning. But her enterprise is scientific in another sense, too. As she writes in her introduction: "As a naturally untidy person, I'm always looking for patterns, some means of imposing order on unruly reality." She admits that she had envisaged the book turning into something resembling a "grand unifying flavour theory". There is a touch of the Casaubon about Segnit, a maniacal desire to totalise, reflected in the very fact that this is a "thesaurus". Fortunately, she is simultaneously aware of the ridiculousness of all such quests, which accounts for the pervasive tone of irony that undercuts her loftier ambitions and winningly brings the book back down to earth.