Through The Scents of Time

We perceive the world and navigate through life mostly through the gifts of sight and sound, often neglecting our sense of smell. Just as it’s good to have an ‘eye’ for colours and designs, or an ‘ear’ for music, it really makes sense (pardon the pun), to have a ‘nose’ for scents.

Smell is as much a part of culture as the Arts. It has its ‘ups and downs’, ‘ins and outs’. Take fashion trends for example – beige is the new white – pink is the new black – orange is the new pink – tartan is so last season – black is back – you can never go wrong with classic white - and the cycle continues.

Or the progression of popular in music, from Punk to Pop to the next ‘It’ genre till we run out of distinctively identifiable genres and start blending Pop with Punk, Rock with Soul, even butchering a classic tune by The Police with HipHop or fusing a Celine Dion ballad into a techno remix. And then the circle winds back to good ol’ fashioned Retro which simply means whatever was popular 20 years ago.

So the same applies to smell and our preference for particular scents. The most obvious example is perfumes. Perfume manufacturers are always coming up with new fragrances because they know that not everyone is gonna love and stick to Old Spice or Chanel No.5 forever. So new scents are created, and more importantly, marketed with a concept that is relevant to the different discourses of masculinity or femininity in society.

You know, like back in those days when ‘macho’ movies like Rambo were the rave, perfumes for men had ‘macho’ written all over them too – Drakkar Noir or Polo, a blend of leather, wood, tobacco, basil and oakmoss notes. Then came the age of the New Man (the sensitive metrosexual fella), and guys started smelling more like ‘spring meadows’ with fresh and zesty scents like Eternity or CK One, a blend of flowery aromas for men AND women.

When it comes to food and cuisine, smell/aroma is just as significant, with chefs fusing different ingredients to create new and exciting flavours, always searching for new ways to blend, infuse, extract or enhance aromas. From classic French cuisine to Western-Asian fusion, or the ‘discovery’ of the latest ‘It’ ingredient – one moment it’s lemongrass, next it’s kaffir lime leaf, and so forth.

The role of the olfaction’s link with memory and emotion is now a very important factor in cuisine. Chefs realise that the meal is no longer just about creating a dish that looks, tastes, smells and feels good. A meal has to ‘move’, to entertain and to reach us on an emotional level. Like the way chocolate soothes some of us when we’re down, how savouring Humbugs (boiled sweets) might make you feel like a kid again, or how waking up to the smell of freshly brewed coffee can affect our morning.

Just as cowboy movies made a comeback not too long ago (and characters like John Rambo and Indiana Jones never know when it’s time to say “when”), long-forgotten flavours may be considered an essential component of a particular dish. We have placed so little importance on olfaction that we never really created a ‘scent vocabulary’ to describe the myriad scents that surround us. And so we rely on our ‘conditioned responses’ and memory to describe aromas, which actually aids in elevating this new-found use of olfactory memory in cuisine. Instead of describing scents with limited and generalised adjectives like sweet, pungent or aromatic, we say things like Smells like the apple pie my Mom used to make when I was a kid, or Feels like hot chocolate on a cold, rainy day, or Reminds me of…...

To erase olfaction from our senses would almost be like erasing half of our childhood memories. So although the sense of smell does not seem as important as sight or sound, we should still appreciate it for its value to the culinary arts, for without aroma, we would lose all the subtleties of flavour, and the personal bond between the meal and emotion would be broken.

Every Breath You Take

Many of us confuse flavour + taste with smell, or perhaps think that all are one and the same. For example, it is common to say, “I love the flavour of vanilla ice cream”, or “I hate the taste of cardamom”. However, to perceive flavour, the brain has to take into account gustatory stimuli (taste) and olfactory stimuli (smell), plus tactile and thermal sensations. Eg. The ‘flavour’ of vanilla ice cream may be the combination of sweetness from sugar, the scent of vanilla, plus creaminess and temperature of the ice cream itself.

While our taste buds can only distinguish among the five distinct qualities of taste: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami, the nose can distinguish among hundreds of substances, and it is said that the average human being can recognize up to 10,000 different odours.

How Smell Works
When odorants (odour molecules) travel through the nose, it hits the olfactory epithelium, located in the roof of the two nasal cavities of the nose, just below and between the eyes. The molecules bind to olfactory receptors, which then transmit signals to the olfactory bulb, located in the brain.

Olfactory receptor neurons are responsible of detecting odours and humans have about 40 million olfactory receptor neurons. You lose your sense of smell when you have a blocked nose simply because odour molecules aren’t able to reach the olfactory receptors. In other words, everything tastes bland when you have a cold not because your tongue has called in sick, but for the obvious fact that your nasal cavity is blocked.

The olfactory system converts olfactory signals into perception (‘meaningful’ sensory information). ‘Smell’ signals are transmitted to areas of the brain such as the olfactory cortex, amygdala, hippocampus and hypothalamus. The amygdala and hippocampus are part of the limbic system, sometimes called the “emotional brain” as it is involved with functions such as emotion, behaviour and long term memory.

This is why many scents can evoke feelings and memories from way back.

Smell and Memory
As such, the role of the olfactory system is not just limited to flirting with our appetites, but with our moods and emotions too. Just a tiny whiff of a scent can alter our moods, bring on a rush of emotions or trigger long-forgotten memories.

When we encounter a new scent, our brain creates a link between this scent and a person, thing or event, and also relates it to how we felt at that moment. The next time we smell this same scent, the link is already there to call up that particular memory or feeling. This is called a ‘conditioned response’. This is also why not everyone likes the same smells.

‘Fishy’ smells from the sea may be unpleasant to some people, but for others, it reminds them of the sea, or days spent beachcombing on a seaweed-covered shore.

Memories triggered by smell can be called ‘olfactory memories’, or what I personally prefer to call a ‘scent journal’. The reason why many smells trigger childhood memories is because we encounter most new scents when we’re young.

Many children (and some adults too!) have a favourite soft toy, pillow or blanket that they’ve had since young. It’s also quite likely to be smelliest thing on earth to everyone else but its owner!

Taitai in da house

Before any regular readers get confused, allow me to point out that this isn’t Benjamin writing (If you notice the sign off below, it’s not by the chef). So this post is just a short intro, to let you know that Chef Ben is busy as always, since returning from our annual vacation. Instead of reminding him every week that he needs to write something to keep his blog alive, and since I’m the editor-writer-techno-geek-person for the website anyway, I thought I might as well start contributing a few posts myself.

So abandoning my personal blog (and leisurely lifestyle) for the mean time, I’ll be posting some stuff on a regular basis. Unfortunately you won’t be getting anything “chef-fy” from me – no recipes or articles about progressive cuisine. Just simple wife-y stuff. I’ll try to keep it as food-related as possible of course. Do still continue visiting the blog and website, as Ben will continue posting recipes and such on his usual irregular basis.

I’m not gonna be all enigmatic about who I am… like She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Neither am I daring enough to dub myself a domestic goddess, as I’m more of a domestic glutton. I’m just Bernadette, The Wife.

Note: Tai tai is “wife” in Mandarin, but the term is more commonly used in Malaysia and Singapore to mean “lady of leisure”.