Flavour Syntagms

Nelson Handel. "Frontiers of Flavour" in The Walrus June 2005

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.

Slow-down appreciation releases the complexity of the succession. Interesting way in which the flavour syntagm launches memory in an almost Proustian gestation.

And so for day 1812
29.11.2011