Bunny Mellon, the American socialite designer of the White House rose gardens and President Kennedy’s gravestone allegedly kept pots of stewed apple bubbling away on the stove at her Virginia estate in tribute to the apple pies made by her mother. She understood the power of scent memory to create a sense of place no matter how vast her house and its estate might be, taking visitors back to a simpler and more homely past- all the way back to her own childhood in fact.
In her essay ‘Sense of Self’, Erin Byers Murray writes about childhood memories and of her mother and the many meals cooked by her, evenly divided between whatever was cooked with whatever was to hand, using a pinch of this and a dab of that, and the meals that were guided in like a plane via precise instructions in recipes torn from Southern Living magazine. Her mother’s food tasted good but it was the functional ‘gotta get the kids fed’ style of cooking that was the bane of the lives of women, stripped of much of its sensual pleasure.
Then the accident happened that changed everything. A head injury stripped her mother of her sense of smell and taste (anosmia) when her olfactory nerves were damaged. Assessments determined that she was still able to differentiate between salty and sweet, albeit an ability which was now drastically reduced and, to a lesser degree, bitter and tart, but for some time, her mother put down the reins in the kitchen and the other family members took over.
Taste and scent memory is complex but this is what ‘saved’ Murray’s mother who, upon baking an almond angel cake by rote for a birthday sometime after the accident- having made it hundreds of times before- realised that her mind’s ‘nose’ was being stimulated by the memory, imprinted deep within her psyche, of what this cake used to smell like. As almond essence dripped into the cake batter and was spun around the bowl by the beaters of the mixer, the scent that pervaded the warm fug of the kitchen might have been beyond her sensory reach but the recollection of it was as intrinsic to her as her ability to bake the cake from memory. And for Murray’s mother, it was enough- more than enough.
Her nerves didn’t magically regenerate and there was no wonderful TV movie recovery, but she began to cook and that cooking was speculative and experimental, liberated from the constraints of sustenance cooking for children. What taste she did have could be challenged and stretched- made to work for her in combination with a new exploration of texture, appearance, mouthfeel (ie using salt to tamp down bitterness) and even heat (menthol scents are ‘cool’ for example). The memories she possessed of the taste and scent of food commingled with this awareness of other qualities, ones she had paid scant attention to in the past. Her gustatory life became one of adventure and the stripping away of boundaries. It transcended the cultural mores of her native cuisine, took her to new places like Japan and Thailand with multi-faceted culinary aesthetics.
I imagine Murrays’ mother surrounded by heaping piles of salt: wafer-like flakes of Maldon from nearby Essex which melt instantly delivering a bolus of super saltiness and the ashes-of-roses tinted chunky crystals of Himalayan which are the salt equivalent of time-release pills. Then there are the colours: an Indian salt-stained pansy-purple as gritty as gunpowder, the damp grey Rhétais salt, and a Hawaiian alaea salt tinted a rust-red from the clay it is mixed with. Vastly different is the dramatic Cyprus black salt resembling a miniature Giants Causeway whose basalt hexagons are slow to melt, crunchy and charcoal-dank. I see her dipping a spoon into a jar of Le Petit Saunier salted caramel sauce in its Breton saxe blue and white livery, recoiling as the astringent sting of malted vinegar and chip shop salt hits her nostrils, or running her fingers through the delicate and translucent crystals of Fleur De Sel from the Guerande, which is sold in beige calico bag drawn closed by a string.
Any of these dramatic salt crystals meet a human need for beauty, texture, and culinary drama before we even mention taste. Salt is the bassline- the doo-wop- if you like and many people with anosmia can still ‘hear’ this just as someone with complete hearing loss might hear Motorhead’s bass reverberating through their body. Hearing is vibration, after all, and the ears are not the only part of the body that can hear. The ‘mind’s tongue and nose’ can help us appreciate aroma and taste in a different way, even if the function of our actual nose and tongue is impaired. And language is an important part of that.
We know that if we lose our sense of smell, we lose much of our ability to appreciate the taste of foods because the two are closely linked. If you don’t believe this, cut a lemon in half and bite into it whilst holding your nostrils tightly closed. The average human being may recognize up to 10,000 separate odours but our language to describe those odours is nowhere near as intricate. It is very hard (near impossible in fact), to explain what something smells like to someone who has yet to smell it and when we describe a taste, it is informed very much by its scent. When we lose our ability to taste, we also risk becoming alienated from those aspects of language that are particularly enriching, yet when we are in full possession of both senses, we can become overly reliant upon words that describe how something smells or tastes.
Roll a word around in your mouth. Feel its shape and form. Before long you will start to imagine it has a flavour, a texture, and a sound that goes far beyond its orthoepy or phonology. You might perceive a word as sounding chunky or spiky or wriggly and then the mind ponders how these words might taste and smell? Yet how much of this is associated with existing taste and scent memory and how might we break free to form new cross-cultural perceptions? Shredded jellyfish was once not part of my sensory lexicon but now, when I wonder what the words ‘wriggly’ or ‘bouncy’ might taste like, I imagine this ( instead of -perhaps- spaghetti). I no longer grasp first for a regular word to describe its flavour. I approached the eating of jellyfish with no real concept of what its flavour and aroma might be (short of ‘the sea’ or ‘salty’) unlike the foods I am used to, and in a weird way, this gave me insight into what it must be like to eat something as an anosmic, where one’s points of reference are … different. This simple exercise holds promise for the communication of the experiences of people with sensory loss, and the way we, as writers and eaters, engage with them.
A person with anosmia can feel disengaged, anhedonic, or dysthymic. It is also dangerous- as Murray points out, her mother was warned never to live alone because of her impaired ability to detect a gas leak. Think of other warning signs: the sweet acetone of diabetic urine or a hint of smoke on the air from a fire; the hot and clean electrical whiff when an appliance overheats or the curdling of milk on the turn. Think of the fact that our unique smell is imprinted on our offspring within moments of birth and that we can sense when a loved one (or a stranger) is nearby because of what our olfactory equipment tells us; a primal and instinctive alert system that helps keep us safe. Fear and heightened emotional arousal are often described in terms of scent (the acrid smell of fear), and we associate certain scents (and tastes) with comfort (vanilla is a common one). In medicine and nursing, scents play their own part in clinical diagnosis or tell us if a patient or client is beginning to self-neglect, perhaps before they realise it themselves. We talk about the ‘scent of neglect’ but neglect in its physical form can be described in far richer terms, none of which have to involve scent. This is important when you consider that the biological component of clinical depression can involve what is referred to as ‘negative symptoms’, one of which can be the blunting of senses. Think about how you might communicate your concern to someone experiencing this. What descriptors might you use?
And anosmia can highly correlate with a risk of emotional lability, impulsivity, depression, and problems with adapting behaviour to the lessons of experience. The ability to smell and taste acts as a system of checks and balances that we are not always conscious of. When Michael Hutchence developed anosmia after a head injury, he told of his sadness that he could no longer “smell or taste his girlfriend.” He considered himself an aesthete and the loss of two of his senses took a terrible toll on his mental health. He became labile in mood, impulsive, and understandably angry.
Anosmia can leave people derealised, as Dr Rachel Hertz explains in The Scent of Desire:
” I felt trapped inside my own head, a kind of bodily claustrophobia, disassociated. It was as though I were watching a movie of my own life. When we see actors in a love scene, we accept that we can’t smell the sweat; when they take a sip of wine, we don’t expect to taste the grapes. That’s how I felt, like an observer watching the character of me.”
After 40 weeks gestation in what you might call an aromatic soup of amniotic fluid, within hours of its birth a newborn will recognise the scent of its mother. Our smellscape revolves around her, yet this is the very opposite of derealisation. In the first few months of independent life, an infant is predisposed to prefer the sweetness of breast milk and will display an aversion towards bitter foods although their preference for breast odour builds as they feed. The latter does not seem to be innate. These responses are designed to protect us from eating poisonous or otherwise high-risk foods although, oddly enough, there is no universal consensus of a ‘bad smell’ which is why the military can't create a generic, cross-cultural smell-based weapon. And boy, have they tried. The ever-changing nature of breast milk primes an infant to cope with an omnivorous diet and, as their kidneys develop, a taste for salt emerges which roughly correlates with the time at which many babies begin to be weaned and are, as a result, exposed to higher salt levels. All other preferences are learned behaviour and that learning can be so strong that we may not overcome our dietary taboos and predilections, no matter how hungry we feel.
Underpinning these dietary taboos, aversions, phobias and fads are strong gustatory and olfactory memories where time, place and food meld in such a way as to transport us back decades in time through our senses. This confluence functions as a way of reinforcing family bonds and developing new ones, as a way of heafing us to our territories (no matter how wide-ranging or compact) whilst also encouraging us to fan outwards towards new people and places; a handy way of discouraging genetic overfamiliarity when we decide to breed. We need the ability to taste and smell our sexual partners and our learning of what is us and what is not us starts in utero as the foetus ingests the amniotic fluid which itself fluctuates in taste and scent. We begin our visceral existence here in a private place where sensate nourishment takes place without us ever having to ask- although we must be satisfied with what we are given. This will be the only occasion when we are completely in thrall to the whims of another although the preferences that will go on to shape our struggles with power and independence through the medium of food are nascent.
The excited kicking of a baby in a highchair as its mother chops up a banana; the hot bustle of boiling water poured into a teapot; clinking vibrations of the pestle as spices are ground, releasing aromatic dust motes into the air; the dry rustle of a corn-husked tamale and the release of its corn-scented breath as it is opened; those last delicious sweetly soggy crumbs of cake that gather at the corner of our mouths; and the salty reptilian dart of our tongues as we capture them inculcate strong ties to a time and place because they are reinforced through repetition. Yet they remain open to reevaluation as we age. We are a sensory millefeuille of feelings and thoughts all of which are individually and culturally contextualised then stored as memories. And just as the layers of a millefeuille soak up the flavours of jam and cream over time, so too do our memories. They can be subject to change as what we feel and think about them evolves, or contracts. It is mind-blowing. Nature is not more complex than we think. It is more complex than we can think.
And the power of these memories! Walking along the banks of an Italian river one unusually hot spring day, a sudden drench of rain penetrated its clay banks. The air became sodden with water vapour, then impregnated with the unmistakable smell of the clay goblets and jugs used by our housekeeper in Mexico. As a child, I was mildly obsessed with this roughly glazed pottery and I would nibble away at the gap between the top of the glaze and the rough clay rims. Bordering upon pica, the earthiness permeated the liquid it held. As I stood by that river I felt the heaviness of the goblet, so large in my five-year-old hands; it was as if they had never been broken and thrown away and this sad fact hardly mattered because, in my mind’s eye, I still owned them. My vision narrowed to what I could see over the goblet’s rim. The concentrated scent of baked earth suffused the air that I breathed and the clear white light of the Sardinian mountains turned heavy, dusty, and straw-yellow as I went back to our Saltillo kitchen and the light that shot in through the gap at the base of the heavy blinds, which had to be kept drawn in the day to keep out the vicious desert sun. It was confusing and surreal.
Erin Byers Murray’s mother instinctively knew what she needed to do to live fully in the world rather than continue to tolerate a gustatory existence diminished of colour and the opportunity to make fresh memories. That almond cake was her Proustian moment in a far more significant way because it guided her towards a new future based on both what she had learned, and what she needed to relearn. It might seem a less frivolous example than that of a stratospherically wealthy woman able to afford to keep pots of apples bubbling on the stoves of her many homes, but it is no more or less touching. Both women were negotiating the tricky present and future by invoking their sensory past.
More reading:
Obviously acquired anosmia is a different kettle of fish to congenital anosmia and the latter is what I have focused on. Abscent is an organisation that can help people with either type. As if Fifth Sense who also offer a wealth of resources. If you have congenital anosmia, redefining the language of sensory description can be even more of a powerful tool. It’s important that food writers consider the nature of the descriptors they use.
I have always been confused by my reaction to a Just William story that, amusingly enough, features a cookery writer. It’s set in wartime and lemons are rationed to the point of scarcity but the cookery writer needs some for a meal where the guest of honour is a magazine editor. William steals a box of lemon-shaped soaps from the closet of Violet Elizabeth Bott’s mother and, in a moment of rashness, pops one into her pot of soup as it cooks, and another under the crust of an apple pie. The meal that results is rather revolting. Permeating this story is the scent of lemons, made even more intoxicatingly desirable by the fact that we know that they were scarce back then (and risk being so again, post-Brexit). What confuses me is my inability to separate my memories of Bronnley’s rather pleasing lemon-shaped soaps, and the actual lemons you eat. They commingle on my mind’s tongue and nose. So I find my mouth watering as I read the story, even though I am also recoiling from a half-buried memory of having my own mouth washed out with soap when I was little. When I roll the word ‘lemon’ around in my mouth, I taste suds, but I also taste the delicious flesh and rind of citrus so much I can feel my salivary glands contract and gush. How miraculous is this? And it is key to reinterpreting two of our most beloved senses when they are impaired so as to help us cope with their loss.
Season To Taste: How I lost my sense of smell and found my way by Molly Birnbaum.
When a Chef Loses Their Sense of Smell via The Counter.
The Scent of Desire by Rachel Hertz and her keynote address.
Yemisi Aribisala beautifully mingles the sensory and sexual world, and in ‘For The Love of Peppers shows how we can describe food using other words and comparisons. Her writing uncovers the personality of everything she encounters, rendering us less dependent on the narrow focus of smell and taste as descriptors.
“While astram has a pointy and macho name, it is a warm and starchy embrace,” writes Nisha Susan in Goya Journal. Like Yemisi’s work, this is an act of culinary reframing.
The newly-published Nose Dive: A field guide to the world’s smells by Harold McGee is pretty comprehensive as is The Smell Culture Reader by Jim Drobnick.
The Poetics of Smell as a Mode of Knowledge on Brainpickings and The Science of Smell: how the most direct of our senses actually works, also on Brainpickings.
Mark Kurlansky on the story of salt.
A Food Republic guide to different kinds of salt.
The politics of flavour in coffee, via Sourced.
When scent and its description is embedded in culturally insensitive tropes.
Please Stop Calling Durian Stinky by Elisabeth Sherman.
Grease and Sweat: Smell and race in 18th century English culture via Taylor Francis Online
On How I Learned That Cities Have Smellscapes by Apoovra Sripathi.
Bee Wilson in the Guardian on anosmia.
Jeffrey Steingarten’s book The Man Who Ate Everything has a great essay about salt and whether there is any real difference between the different types.
For an exploration of vinegar, Angela Clutton’s The Vinegar Cupboard, and Harlan Turk’s Acid Trip: Travels in the world of vinegar should be your first port of call.
Samin Nosrat’s ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’ is both book and Netflix series. Her book is really useful if you have problems with your sense of taste and smell as is Ryan Riley’s although the latter focuses more on cancer-related sensory loss.
More about scent-based weaponry here.
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