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.