Season to Taste (25 page)

I roasted chicken and potatoes, moist and salty with crisp-bronzed skin. I made salmon with lentils, salads with pine nuts and Parmesan cheese. I braised short ribs in a spicy tomato sauce until the tender meat fell off the bone, served over a thick puddle of cornmeal polenta. I baked pork chops in a crust of bread crumbs, parsley, and Dijon, which we ate alongside cauliflower, thick slices that I roasted until caramel brown. Simple, hearty fare: meals that kept us warm.

On weekends Matt and I saw friends over pork dumplings in Chinatown, over dark rye beer at parties in Brooklyn. We frequented the Polish restaurant around the corner, where we shared pierogi thick with cheese and fragrant with butter, sauerkraut ripe with vinegar and caraway seed. We went on early morning jogs alongside the frozen East River, our feet in tandem with the rhythm of run, the perfume of boats and brine. We took walks through the snowy streets, passing cafés that smelled of warmth and coffee, and alleyways that reeked of refuse. I concentrated on the sensory details of New York, which felt intimate and intense: the scent of both diesel exhaust and sweet-roasted nuts; the heat of the crowded, delayed Q train; and the echoing clank of recycled bottles picked up off the sidewalk before dawn.

And all the while I worried.

I often failed to recognize the scents of the city. Painfully aware of this after the test at the clinic in Philadelphia, I tested myself again and again, whenever I caught a scent, however slight, in my path. I challenged myself to sniff and remember, to recall and identify as I walked around my world. There was that sticky sweet at the food cart near Times Square (soft pretzels), the strong citrus of the market in Chelsea (grapefruit), and the woodsy dust at the butcher shop (cedar chips, floor). But I couldn’t tell what that savory scent outside the subway station was, the sour one by home, or the cool, wet one that I smelled on an unseasonably warm morning sitting by the window as I read a book. The odors whipped past in twists and turns just out of my perceptual reach. I would ask Matt: “What
is
that?” He would tell me without second thought:
it’s meat from that kabob vendor; it’s trash from that Dumpster; it’s the rain.

I retreated to the kitchen. I wanted the smell of basil on my fingertips, the scent of fry oil in my hair. I rolled my own sheets of pasta for a lasagna that I baked with spinach and ricotta cheese, filling the kitchen with the saucy scent of tomatoes and garlic. I braised chicken, baked tofu, and seared cuts of lamb. Pots of rust-red chili flavored with just a bit of dark chocolate simmered on the stove, and I leaned over to inhale the almost-imperceptible bittersweet of its steam. I could recognize these smells. I could see their source. I felt comforted by their definable presence.

I baked, too: banana bread, zucchini muffins, and ginger cookies redolent with spice. I had promised an old friend that I would make a four-tiered cake for her wedding, which was scheduled for that summer, and I practiced with dozens of layers that came out of my oven tender and moist, a bite of almond and a bit of lemon on the exhale. I whipped gallons of rich vanilla frosting in my mixer, the aroma of butter and sugar a reminder of what had once been gone, of what I had missed in the company of that same whir at the bakery near Boston those years before.

I moved easily in the kitchen. I felt better there than I had in years. I once again began to trust my intuition at the stove. I allowed myself to experiment—concentrating still on temperature, texture, and color, but taste and smell as well. There were still mishaps. But I allowed myself small whispers of thought: perhaps through my own trial and error, my own practice and my own doubt, I could still cook.

In the meantime, I cocooned myself among tastes and smells that I knew. I spent entire days looking forward to dinner, to the moment I would begin to chop onions and garlic, bring pots of salted water to boil on the stove. I concentrated on the details of perception, the inhale and exhale, the nuance of herb and spice. I became obsessed with flavor. More so than I already was.

I knew the connection between smell and taste. I knew that I could taste the salt of my pasta, the sweet of my cakes. I could taste the sour to the lemon in my tea and the bitter to my coffee. I knew that only with smell was flavor born. Scent, the kind that came from the back of my throat as I chewed, the unpoetically named
retronasal olfaction,
allowed me to glean the sweet-garden flavor of tomato sauce, the almond marzipan in the layers of cake. Smell gave me the jasmine to my tea and the layer of vanilla in my latte. I had already spoken with Marcia Pelchat, a sensory psychologist at Monell, who demonstrates the basic nature of flavor with jelly beans and breath. “Most people are unaware that the nose plays a role in flavor,” she had told me. “So when people have a cold they say that they can’t taste anything. But if you put sugar or salt on their tongues, they can taste it. What they’re missing is the olfactory component of food.”

I walked to the farmers’ market in Union Square every Saturday, drawn by the promise of fresh eggs and tiny new potatoes even in the harsh winter cold. I went alone, wanting to take my time, stopping at each stall to touch the bulbs of dust-crusted beets or to taste the pickled okra made locally by hand. I walked past plastic-wrapped cookies and vacuum-packed meats. I stopped to smell the hot cider, which steamed in a pot on a portable burner, and then the green tea, which reminded me of home.

On a snowy afternoon in February I stopped at one of the stalls in the market selling apples. Their tables, lined up under a small tent, were covered in boxes of fruit: greens, reds, knobbly big yellows. The air smelled of the faint acid tang to the fruit, some of which had been sliced and laid on a tray for sampling among the crowds, and the smoke wafting up from a cigarette nearby. I began to load apples into a sheer plastic bag. I packed in a lot. For these, I had a plan.

That evening, as I had yelled to Matt when I headed out the door, I would bake an apple pie. I would use an assortment of apples, mixing colors and textures. There would be cinnamon and hints of both lemon and orange. A crust of butter and shortening would hug the pan, emerging from the oven flaky and bronze, steaming scents of fall.

On my way home, my shoulder sagging under the weight of my bounty, I took a Macintosh out of the bag and took a bite. The apple was tart and sweet and juice ran down my hand. My naked fingers soon grew numb. It smelled like orchards, like my kitchen in college during the hours I assembled my pies; it tasted like all the autumns of my childhood rolled into one.

But as I walked, I realized that I could smell something else. It was familiar yet unknown, something biting and faintly metallic. Perhaps it came from the trash can, overflowing on the sidewalk nearby. Perhaps it was the exhaust from a taxi speeding past. Like many new smells—smells that were there but not, recognizable but unknown, perpetually on the tip of my tongue—I just couldn’t figure it out.
Perhaps,
I thought,
it is simply the scent of cold
.

I MET ELAINE KELLMAN-GROSINGER,
the chief flavor chemist for Citromax, a small, family-run company that for generations has produced lemon oil from Argentina, in the lobby of her Upper West Side apartment building one morning before she left for work. Grosinger had invited me to spend the day with her at her office, a formidable warehouse-like building off the highway in New Jersey.

Grosinger is a flavorist. She is an inventor and scientist, a taste maker and trendsetter, the closest to Willy Wonka I may ever meet. Chemists like Grosinger create the flavors added to a huge number of processed foods, the kind devoured daily by consumers all over the world. They duplicate flavors found in nature and make up some of their own. Flavorists work to entice the buyer, to entrance the palette, to fool the mouth. “The consumption of food flavorings may stand as one of the modern era’s most profound collective acts of submission to illusion,” wrote Raffi Khatchadourian in “The Taste Makers,” an article published in the
New Yorker
in 2009.

On that day, Grosinger, whose official title is Director of Research and Development, stepped out of the elevator at 8:30
A.M.
wearing black pants and high heels, blue eye shadow, and a bright purple coat, one that appeared to be made out of fake alligator skin. With platinum blond hair down to her shoulders, Grosinger wasn’t at all what I imagined. She didn’t look like a chemist to me.

“Molly?” she asked with a smile that expanded the width of her face. We shook hands.

“Call me Ellie,” she said warmly. We took the stairs to the basement garage, climbed into her car, and began driving west. Destination: Carlstadt, a small town across the Hudson. After all, New Jersey, as I had read in Eric Schlosser’s
Fast Food Nation,
produces two-thirds of the flavor additives in the United States.

The flavors made by chemists like Grosinger are both natural and artificial. They are added to sports drinks and yogurts, fruit rollups and frostings, some types of juice and much more. They are an integral part of diet sodas, vanilla soymilk, and my mother’s favorite brand of margarine. They are added to the big-brand products, household-name products, but hardly ever developed by the companies themselves. They are created using volatile chemicals and mathematical formulas, beakers and pipettes. They come from complicated mixtures of chemical compounds, ones with foreign names like benzaldehyde, cis-3-hexenol, and linalool. They are determined by computers and machines. But first, they are determined by scent. Grosinger works on the thin line between a chef and a perfumer, a chemist and an artist. The results hang in the balance between taste and smell.

Like most in this small industry—there are fewer than five hundred flavorists in the United States—Grosinger didn’t originally set out to become a flavor chemist. “I stumbled into it,” she told me with her bubbly laugh as we drove through the Lincoln Tunnel toward Carlstadt. She was a science major in college and then went on to begin a PhD in genetics. That career path didn’t last long, however. “It wasn’t my passion,” she told me. Also, with a laugh: “I hated working with fruit flies.”

In 1981, Grosinger began looking for a temporary job in New York. She needed something to tide her over until she could figure out what to do next. When she interviewed at International Flavors and Fragrance, one of the largest producers of flavors and fragrances in the United States, she loved it there immediately. “Every lab smelled like something else,” she said. “It was the most interesting industry.” When they asked her if she wanted to train to become a full-fledged flavor chemist, she said yes.

At IFF, Grosinger tasted and smelled hundreds of chemicals—natural and artificial, ones that reminded her of peaches and cloves, ones that were like rubbing alcohol or liquid sugar. She smelled them again and again, memorizing them, writing them down, describing them with terminology she learned by flash cards. She had to. The only way to make a flavor, which can be constructed of hundreds of disparate chemical ingredients, she told me, is to understand every individual element. It took years.

But when she finished, she entered into an exploding industry, one that now has a strong grip on the taste preferences of everyone who eats packaged food. The average American eats 31 percent more packaged foods than fresh food, and more packaged food per person than those in most other countries in the world, reported the
New York Times
in 2010.

We stepped out of the car in the parking lot behind Citromax that morning at nine.

“Do you smell that?” she asked as we walked toward the door. I did. There was a strong smell of early spring, the fresh scent of recently mowed lawn. “That’s a good smell, that grass smell,” she said. “We use it in the lab.”

I couldn’t imagine where.

The practice of adding flavor to food began thousands of years ago. Spices, the trade of which first developed in the Middle East around 2000
B.C.
, were used to defend against spoilage and to improve taste. They came from the bark and buds, fruit and roots, seeds and stems of both plants and trees. During the Middle Ages, spices were imported from Asia and Africa, traded from the Middle East to Rome, and sold at steep cost. In Rome, writes Jack Turner in
Spice: The History of a Temptation,
spices were an expensive taste. The most common, and one of the only spices available to the majority of the population, was black pepper. A pound of cinnamon, however, cost the equivalent of six years of work for the common man. Thus spices—and, therefore, flavor—became a sign of luxury and power. “For most of their history spices spoke unequivocally of taste, distinction and wealth,” Turner writes.

Other means of flavor came with geographical variants: lemons, which first grew in Asia, were not known to those in ancient Rome; vanilla and chocolate, which are made from plants native to the New World, didn’t arrive in Europe until much later. Processed sugar was not introduced into the European diet until the seventeenth century, according to Mark M. Smith, author of
Sensing the Past: Seeing, Smelling, Tasting and Touching in History,
which was a momentous shift, “changing what people tasted and the way they tasted.”

Today, bottles of spice from around the world line the kitchen pantries of most homes in the United States. But flavor chemistry, the first threads of the industry now known today, didn’t begin until at least the seventeenth century, when oils, extracted or distilled from fruits and vegetables, roots and herbs and plants, began to be used. These flavors were natural flavors, made from known ingredients, and were used usually by pharmacists to mask the unpleasant aftertaste to medicines like lozenges and syrups. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century and the rise of organic chemistry that the modern practice of flavor chemistry commenced. In 1832, benzaldehyde, the simplest aromatic aldehyde, which smells of almonds, was one of the first volatile molecules identified as having a flavor. In 1874, two German scientists created vanillin, the first flavor synthesized in the lab, which they extracted from coniferous trees. Then, flavor was added to products like gelatin, soft drinks, and ice cream, which had only recently begun to be commercially produced, according to Joanne Chen in
The Taste of Sweet
. “New varieties emerged in the years that followed, and Americans embraced them as unique and sophisticated—bubble gum, cola, tutti-frutti.”