I buy a sizzling lamb kebab, redolent with cumin and hot pepper, from the charcoal brazier of a tattered Uygur street vendor sitting at the entrance to a new subway station. About the only thing left in China that clings to a shred of authenticity is the food. Chinese cuisine flows from a 5,000-year tradition that blends sustenance, medicine, religion, social order, and philosophy. China, I realize, is the perfect backdrop against which to explore how the genuine is transformed into the artificial.
Four days after landing, I meet Jeff Peppet, Givaudan’s global director of marketing communications, and Willi Grab, director of flavour science, at 1221, one of the hip new Western-style eateries that have sprung up in Shanghai. It was Jeff’s infectious, gee-whiz enthusiasm that hooked me on the idea that flavours have something to say about world culture. Willi, a calm Swiss-German with a gentle smile, is based in Singapore and has been chasing flavours for thirty-six years.
Moments after we sit down, the waiter fills our teacups with a mix of green tea leaves, small dried fruits, and scalding hot water. Willi lifts his cup like a sommelier. He sniffs it carefully. “It smells like vettaye,” he says. I don’t quite understand him. “You’re not from the country,” he says, and then repeats more slowly, “vet hay.” I sip my tea. Astonishingly, it tastes exactly as might a field of newly mown hay in the morning dew—grassyu and slightly bitter.
They do the ordering. When the dishes arrive, I dig into something called “spicy beef,” slices of tender sirloin in a rich brown sauce. It’s served with a small round loaf of sesame-seed-coated, scallion-flavoured bread. Willi gingerly smells the bread. “Whoa!” he says, recoiling as if something bit him. His pale eyes twinkle with delight. Jeff smells it too. “Amazing,” he says. I taste the bread. It tastes like . . . bread. Good bread, oniony bread, but bread. I’m starting to sense that my companions are experiencing the meal quite differently than from me. So I ask Willi to describe the dish I’m eating. Suddenly serious, he furrows his brow, chopsticks a piece of meat, and sniffs. “It has a natural beef flavour,” he says, “not a beef that’s planned.” Then he describes something he calls “the pepper note,” which he says features a Szechuan pepper called hua jiao, unusual for its effervescent quality. “Like when you put the tip of a battery in your mouth,” he says. “We say it’s cold, hot, not cold, and not hot, all at the same time.”
As we talk, the world of food science begins to open its doors to me. Taste, Willi explains, holds many properties that make it unique in the pentarchy of the senses, but subtlety is not one of them. Your mouth contains but five types of chemo-sensory receptors that are capable of bluntly discerning just five gustatory qualities: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and something called umami, which loosely translates from Japanese as “deliciousness.” ( It’s the “mouth feel” you get from mushrooms or beef. Umami has no flavour of its own; it simply makes other flavours taste better.) Your mouth also senses pain, called trigeminal perception, which allows you to discern the hot in chili pepper and the cool in menthol.
On the other hand, the 340-odd chemo-sensory receptors in your nose can distinguish an enormous range of odours. When you eat, you smell your food twice; once through your nose as it approaches your mouth (orthonasal perception) and again during consumption as the odour ascends the back of your throat (retronasal perception). Your brain combines this complex scent information with basic taste sensations and trigeminal perception to create what you identify as a food’s flavour.
Though a science, flavour creation is to some degree a literary conceit. To understand it, you must learn to speak it trippingly on your tongue. Every act of tasting has syntax, a succession of distinct flavour sensations that unfold through time. For flavourists, each expresses itself like a well-constructed line of poetry, a series of metaphoric descriptors that attempt to limn the playful dance of experience happening in their mouths. When you eat a strawberry, you don’t apprehend strawberry, you experience a series of stimulations from sweet to sour to lemony to green to hay to sweet, green, sweet, sour, and so on. These are called flavour notes.
Flavour creators often employ the language of music to describe their work. They speak of the top, middle, and bottom notes, of overtones and undertones, of dominants, sustain, and the way a note “comes in.” They also borrow freely from the language of visual art, describing certain experiences as being in the foreground while others recede. They refer to a flavour’s point of focus, its dominant colour, the vibrancy, and the impression it leaves.
Descriptors such as “brothy,” “citral,” “horsey,” and “green” dot the flavour industry’s vocabulary. Within these highly specialized terms there are finer shadings: the green of fresh-cut grass, the green of citrus, or the green of new tomatoes, for example. This vocabulary references a set of training experiences that flavourists undergo to attune themselves to known standards. Hence, Willi’s description of the tea: if you had asked me, I’d have said “green tea,” but to Willi it was wet hay, and he was precisely correct.
Embracing the descriptive language of flavourists forever changes the way you perceive food. No longer are you able to say “what a great pizza” or “delicious pie.” In fact, no longer are you able to conceive of pie as “pie.” Instead, each mouthful presents a postmodern collage of individual stimulations, as distinct from one another as the brush strokes of a Monet or the words of a sentence. The syntax of sensation plays itself out in your consciousness, and your mind assembles its meaning.
