If you know even a little about the olfactory system, you get the general idea that at the very beginning of any perceptible smell are numerous events in which odorous molecules bind to receptor proteins. This ultimately results in a neural signal being transmitted into the brain via the olfactory bulb. This was my starting point, too, but I decided it would be interesting to know how all that actually happened.
As someone with a creative bent, I want to make sure I have access to the widest possible range of flavors to work with, just as an artist would want to have a lot of colored paints at hand. Some seasonings have very specialized uses and stay in the cabinet, but others are used so often I keep them on a rack right above the cooktop. Most herbs and spices are best suited either for savory foods or sweet ones. A few, like ginger, have shape-shifting characters that lets them do dual duty. Of these, coriander is the king in my kitchen.
I was a wine and food critic and writer before the Wine Trials (Book: The Wine Trials, a cross-country experiment in blind wine tastings), and was trained as a sommelier. I really felt I was not a snob or a bullshit artist. But after the trials, it became apparent to me that there was absolutely no relationship between wine price and drinker preference, except maybe that most people preferred inexpensive wines to expensive ones.
Beer is an extraordinarily fragile beverage. It is composed of well over a thousand chemical components coexisting in an uneasy and short-lived balance, far from anything resembling chemical equilibrium. It’s best within weeks of its packaging day, a fact that few of its fans really realize.
GS: “We try to get people to use a standard vocabulary. You can use any words you want as long as they’re consistent and everybody on the team knows what they represent. People use terms related to their experience like: “grandma’s basement,” but I don’t know what your grandma’s basement smells like; I only know my own grandma’s. So you have to common language. And if you’re going to use a common language, it might as well be the industry standard one, so you can talk to people outside your own company. Of course, different audiences have different needs and interests.”
GS: “We try to get people to use a standard vocabulary. You can use any words you want as long as they’re consistent and everybody on the team knows what they represent. People use terms related to their experience like: “grandma’s basement,” but I don’t know what your grandma’s basement smells like; I only know my own grandma’s. So you have to common language. And if you’re going to use a common language, it might as well be the industry standard one, so you can talk to people outside your own company. Of course, different audiences have different needs and interests.”
This post deals with the fascinating world of functional fragrance: the commercial art of adding aromas to household products. Since so much money is riding on this, it tends to be highly secretive, and it’s very difficult to get those involved to really tell stories about the tricks and techniques that make these products and deal with our perceptually messy selves. John has moved on to other things, so was happy to share some insights with me.
This post deals with the fascinating world of functional fragrance: the commercial art of adding aromas to household products. Since so much money is riding on this, it tends to be highly secretive, and it’s very difficult to get those involved to really tell stories about the tricks and techniques that make these products and deal with our perceptually messy selves. John has moved on to other things, so was happy to share some insights with me.
Obviously a work this large has a lot in it, so here I’m dealing with a small portion of the book where he describes the beer styles of the day. Early on in the book Lacambre asserts that at that time, just about all (75 percent) beers from Belgium and Holland were wheat (or other adjunct) based beers, even “the ones we call barley beers.” This was prior to the arrival of lagers in Belgium.
I was involved for a couple of years with a group that was trying to put some logic and science into the often fuzzy thinking around beer and food pairing. I think we made some progress, but one of the things we knew we needed was a literature search. This meant combing through a ton of scientific papers to look for proven interactions, which was not an easy task, since they tended to be buried in research about particular receptors and other biological systems.