How losing my sense of taste made me a better cook
A few years ago, I had a bad cold followed by a minor chest infection. I couldn’t smell or taste much while I was sick, which is obviously normal; but at some point I realised that I didn’t really have a cold any more, but my senses were still fucked up.
My friend Zoe was getting married later that year, and while I was still getting over the chest infection, a group of us went to her native Portugal for her hen. Our first night there, we went to one of her favourite restaurants. As we shared bottle after bottle of vinho verde, my friends exclaimed in delight over the food. I couldn’t taste a thing. I could tell the chicken was beautifully cooked — the skin was perfectly charred and blistered, the meat juicy — but it tasted like nothing. If I closed my eyes, I could have been eating pretty much anything.
The rest of the weekend was the same. Curled up in the shade of a beach umbrella, I ate chocolate ice cream that could have been vanilla. My friend Moïra was delighted to pick up a jar of her favourite, hard-to-find-in-Ireland brand of peanut butter. I tried a little; I could just about tell that it was peanut butter, but that was all. We bought pastéis de nata, and I appreciated the impressively crisp, flaky pastry, and the silkiness of the filling, but all I could taste was a vague impression of sugar.
Back at home, I talked to my doctor. He confirmed what Google had already told me: this just happens sometimes, it’s called anosmia, it might be permanent or it might not, and either way there’s not a lot you can do about it. “It’s not that much of a problem, anyway,” he said, and I pointed out that the ability to smell smoke or identify spoiled food is non-trivial, but I knew what he meant; of course it wasn’t life-changing in the same way that losing my eyesight or hearing would have been. It was just depressing, and a pain in the ass. (Although I did have one alarming near miss, when I was cleaning the cooker and accidentally switched on a gas ring without noticing; I proceeded to sit at the kitchen table browsing Facebook, and getting progressively sleepier and more light-headed, until my brother-in-law walked in and asked why the room reeked of gas.)
I continued to google, hoping to learn something useful from other people’s experiences; I read about the Bake Off contestant who’d lost her sense of smell and had to leave the show; I read sad stories about people who became completely anosmic and found themselves isolated from everyone, even their partners or children, unable to respond to their scents and pheromones. I sniffed my daughter’s hair in alarm. There was no smell I could consciously detect, but after a minute came that same wave of oxytocin-induced calm that I’d felt smelling her head when she was a newborn.
There were a few scents and tastes I could still pick up on. I could still smell pork, for some reason. Unfortunately, the smell of pork makes me feel sick, and I keep kosher anyway, so this was wildly unhelpful. Perversely, I could also taste cilantro, which I’ve always loathed. In better news, my taste buds could still detect sugar and salt, vinegar and lemon juice. Meat still had a vague umami-ness about it, but without looking I couldn’t have told beef apart from lamb or duck, and chicken was only identifiable by its lighter texture. It was like trying to taste food through a paper bag.
I had always loved to cook, but now I had to learn to do it at a remove. Instructions like “toast the spices until fragrant” were meaningless; if I wasn’t sure the milk in the fridge was fresh, I had to make someone smell it for me; I became fastidious about setting oven timers, since I couldn’t trust my nose to tell me when a dish was ready, or burning. Trying a new recipe was a shot in the dark; I would serve dinner and then quiz my husband in detail about how everything tasted. “How are the spices? Does the smoked paprika come through? Is there enough garlic? Too much garlic? Would it be better with lime juice instead of lemon, do you think? Can you taste the honey at all?” He patiently answered all my questions as best he could, but having someone describe my cooking to me was not the same as experiencing it for myself.
Even more than cooking, I have always loved to eat, and this, too, had to be relearned. Now that nothing tasted interesting, I had to find something else to appreciate about food. I gravitated to anything with a crunchy topping or a breadcrumb coating, crispy skin, a sticky sauce, or contrasting temperatures or textures. Perfectly-cooked chips with crunchy ends, crinkle-cut crisps, creme brûlée with a properly glassy top layer, crusty bread, the crispy salmon skin rolls at Yo Sushi, a really chewy toffee, anything with crispy fried shallots on top, anything with flaked almonds, and so on. Eating something with texture, or something that made a noise when I bit into it, created much-needed sensory feedback and reassured my brain that I was actually eating.
This fascination with crunch and texture and mouthfeel made me a more conscious cook. I had never bothered with garnishes before, not really seeing the point; now, for me, they could be the most (or the only) rewarding part of a meal. I was much more careful about trying to fry things just right and get things to caramelise properly. I tweaked existing recipes to make them more texturally interesting. It was not a challenge I had ever wanted, but I was determined to make the best of it.
Two years passed.
My sense of smell came back very gradually. I didn’t even notice for a while, but one day it struck me that food had more of a taste than it used to. Bit by bit, scents and flavours came back to me. Obviously, my first taste of chocolate was a delight, and so was the first time I smelled fresh-cut grass. Sushi had a taste again. So did a good medium-rare steak. I could smell my favourite perfume. Turf smoke at my parents’ house. This year, I can even smell the Christmas tree.
One evening I sat in a restaurant with some of the friends I’d been to Portugal with, watching them eating an antipasti platter. I was a whole two feet away on the other side of the table, but I could smell the sliced cucumber and tomatoes they were eating, and even the olive oil drizzled on top. I was so damn happy. (We still need to go back to Portugal, though, because I’m determined to find out what that chicken tastes like.)
Not everything came back. Red wine never tasted the same again, although it does smell nice. Sweat smells weird; not better or worse particularly, but different. Milk chocolate tastes a bit odd and floral, but I always preferred dark anyway. My husband recently broke down and admitted that I’ve been putting too much lemon juice in everything, because I can’t taste it in smaller quantities. I feel a bit bad about that, but realistically I’m probably going to keep doing it. Lemons are awesome.
