Harold Mcgee - Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the Worlds Smells

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N o matter where or how youre reading these words, at this very moment theres a world swirling all around you, and into you, that teems with the makings of delight, disgust, understanding, and wonderment. Its an invisible nimbus of flying molecules: countless specks of matter launched into the air we breathe, whizzing at highway speeds, whose presence we perceive as smells. This book is about those specks and smells, and about making the most of our access to them.

Many fine books have been written on our sense of smell, on the pleasing aromas of food and drinks and perfumes, on the nature of disgust. Here Ive put together something different: a guide to the wide world of smells, nice and not, and the airborne molecular specks that stimulate them. Since the specks are representative bits from throughout the material cosmos, I like to call this wide world the osmocosm, from osme, the ancient Greek for smell or odor, with its inner resonance and hint of wizardly magic. The osmocosm contains multitudesthousands of different molecules at least, possibly thousands of thousands. Theres more to it than even the most sensitive among us can experience. And much or all of it is inaccessible to the many people whose sense of smell has somehow been impaired. But no matter how much of it we happen to notice, were always immersed in the osmocosm. Its a fundamental feature of the world we inhabit. Its well worth exploring, even if only in imagination and thought.

The general term for any airborne molecule is volatile, a word that derives from the Latin for to fly and was first applied centuries ago to birds and butterflies and other winged creatures. It was one of these original volatiles, a flavorful wild bird, that drew me into exploring the world of molecular volatiles. Let me explain how it did, and how I hope youll use this guide to become a smell explorer yourself.

My longtime beat is the science of cooking. Back in 2005, when experimental cooking was the talk of the restaurant industry, I traveled to Spain and England to get a taste of its innovations. The leading avant-garde chefs, the Adris and Rocas and Heston Blumenthal, aspired to give diners an unforgettable meal, with long menus of novel dishes that were variously startling, amusing, baffling, and sometimes delicious. It was a stimulating few days. But my most memorable mouthful came near the end, during a very traditional British lunch with Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver at their London restaurant St. John.

It was early fall, so I ordered grouse, a game bird just then in season that Id never had the chance to taste. It came roasted whole, rare and plainly, on a slice of toast, with a tuft of fresh watercress. I expected to enjoy it, but not that the first bite would leave me speechless. It did. I was completely absorbed, first by intense sensationa meatiness that was almost too strong to be pleasant, and edged with bitternessand then by confused emotion. I was momentarily paralyzed, unable to say a word to my tablemates. They looked at me with some concern, but then Fergus smiled, nodded, and said: Ah, of course. Your first grouse.

Id always been interested in understanding what makes foods delicious, but that experience impressed me like no other with the power of flavor to trigger strong feelingand to persist. That grouse was still in my mouth many hours later as I tried to concentrate on a performance of Shakespeares Tempest.

Another moment several years later impressed me with the power of aroma alone. I had managed to grow what looked like an oversize taste bud on the tip of my tongue, maybe an eighth of an inch across: a good joke for a food writer! Eventually I saw a specialist who advised removing it. He gave me a local anesthetic, snipped it out, then cauterized the wound with an electrical instrument that burns and seals the blood vessels. There was a puff of smoke, and I smelled the typical aroma of beef on a very hot grill, burned but also slightly decomposed. A surprise, but it made perfect sense: it was the aroma of grilled McGee! Another good joke. And as I had that lighthearted thought, I got light-headed, then leaden-limbed, and broke into a cold sweat. The physician quickly reclined the chair, and in a couple of minutes I was fine again, just embarrassed. I had thought that I was taking the experience in stride, even relishing the irony, but my body ambushed me. Another unforgettable moment and smell.

The usual cultural touchstone for connecting flavor with emotion is the morsel of madeleine cake that Marcel Prousts narrator dunks into a cup of linden-blossom tea in the first volume of his novel la recherche du temps perdu, or In Search of Lost Time. That bite surprises the unnamed narrator with a shudder of exquisite pleasure that he eventually traces back to tasting the same combination in idyllic childhood. My shudders werent exactly pleasurable: they seemed more likely to be instinctive warnings. The grouse was so strong and funky that it might have been spoiled; cauterized tongue probably evoked the misery of my tonsillectomy twenty years before. But was that all they meant? I felt there was something else going on.

My ruminations eventually led me to a less celebrated passage of Proust that resonated much more. In the fourth volume, Sodom and Gomorrah, the narrator indulges in a favorite drink and is struck by the sensations it provokes:

The orange squeezed into the water seemed to yield to me, as I drank, the secret life of its ripening growth, its beneficent action upon certain states of that human body which belongs to so different a kingdom, its powerlessness to make that body live, but on the other hand the process of irrigation by which it was able to benefit it, a hundred mysteries revealed by the fruit to my senses, but not at all to my intellect.