Most people who enjoy food find pleasure and excitement in eating. Eating is more than just chewing and swallowing, it is a process of tasting.
Ultimately, the excitement in eating comes from being able to taste more flavors, being able to recognize more aromas, and finally, in learning to make finer and finer distinctions among those flavors and aromas of our foods. What separates filling our bellies from eating a gourmet meal is not the quality of the food, but how much we taste it.
It is this process of making finer and finer distinctions that gives us great pleasure in eating. It is this ability to discover the elegance and subtlety of a food that changes everyday eating into an art.
The problem for most of us is that we don’t have a vocabulary for tasting. We don’t know which words to use to describe flavor, so we really don’t know what we are eating.
In many of the classes I teach at the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago, students practice the art of eating through a series of simple tastings.
To begin, each student is given a sheet listing 10 categories in which students might search for words to describe the aromas and 12 categories in which to search for words to describe flavors (see accompanying chart).
Students are then given a tasting sheet on which to make notes (completed examples follow) and are asked to smell and taste a food, first fresh, then dried, and finally canned. Tomatoes and pears are used as examples here.
After smelling a wedge of a fresh tomato, students write the aromas on the tasting sheets. If at a loss for words, they refer to the sheet that lists catgories and search for a word in one or more of those categories.
Although our noses are extraordinary at distinguishing aromas, the first few sniffs in this exercise always seem difficult. But by the time the tomato is chewed and the textures are noted, the search for words to describe the flavors of the tomato is easier.
The most difficult part of this exercise is remembering to use words that describe aromas to describe aromas, and words that describe flavor to describe flavors, and words that describe textures to describe textures. So a tomato cannot smell “sweet” (sweet is a flavor) or taste “slimy” (slimy is a texture).
In his gastronomic memoir, “Delights and Prejudices” (Collier Books, $12.95), James Beard coins the phrase “taste memory” to describe his ability to remember flavors for as long as five or six decades.
Beard didn’t remember a food the way one might remember the image of a baby taking his or her first steps. What Beard remembered were the words he used to describe the food to himself. As food played an increasingly important role in his life, he began remembering more and more of the words.
To learn to develop your taste vocabulary and taste memory, try this exercise. Buy a fresh tomato or pear, some dried tomatoes or pears and a can of tomatoes or pears.
Make notes on the aromas you smell in each, their textures and flavors, using the aromas and flavor categories as a guide. Then read through the completed tasting sheet here and compare your findings with those of one of my recent classes. Then try again, searching for more aromas and flavors.
If you find this little exercise exciting, then you are hooked on the process, and you are well on your way to becoming an everyday practitioner of the art of eating.
