edible AESTHETICS
What Calls To Us How scent is always a homecoming By Sarah Lagrotteria • Photography by Marlene Rounds
T
wo sailors, fresh from icy seas, stumble and weave their way through the dark streets of a seaside town in Massachusetts, searching for salvation in the form of chowder. Their only guide a series of vague directions to an unmarked door hidden in a snow-banked landscape of alleys and dead ends.
If you made it past “Call me Ishmael” in Moby Dick, the scene might sound familiar. Herman Melville devotes an ecstatic chapter — ”Chowder”— to the clam and cod varieties Ishmael and Queequeg devour after their first trip out. Once found, the mystery door opens to “a warm savory steam from the kitchen” and, according to Ishmael, “when that smoking chowder came in…Oh, sweet friends! Hearken to me… Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty voyage, we despatched it with great expedition.” Melville gets his science right. Ishmael and Queequeg are more hungry for the cold. Cold burns calories and the body cries out for extra nourishment. Cold also dulls the nose and dry, winter air slows the spread of scent molecules. In winter we smell less, and because we smell less what we do smell comes at us sharply, clear of interference. And if the source is both hot and humid, like soup? That savory aroma would have volleyed through the air to torch the icy cover of Ishmael’s nose with buttery heat. What I took from my first reading of Moby Dick, what stayed with me all these years is the smell of that chowder. But Melville doesn’t describe the scent, not really. All he gives us is “savory aroma” and, later, “fishy.” Scent is the lifeblood of food. Without it, there is no taste. An experienced cook relies as much on her nose as she does her eyes and ears. A smell tells us immediately if things are going well and one half second too late if they aren’t (the damn toast). Cooking, putting meat or vegetable to heat, triggers chemical reactions, all of which leave an aromatic trace. Our ancestors depended upon smell to keep them alive—avoiding, no doubt, fishy. We depend on it still, and, threat of death largely removed, we savor it. But do we ever really describe it?
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WINTER 2016
edible COLUMBUS