Free Remembering Smell by Bonnie Blodgett Page B

beer until its odor had the audacity to invade the "better" neighborhoods and caused such a stink that the brewery finally had to install filters.
    As I instinctively raised my hand to cover my nose, the sweet strains of "The Little Drummer Boy" gently nudged my thoughts away from the salacious apricot Danish, flaky kolacky, and caramel pecan rolls to the petits fours. How pure they looked, their smooth icing topped with dainty pink flower buds. On impulse, I added two dozen of the chaste little cakes to my order. Simplicity is the essence of a petit four's taste as well as its appearance. Butter, sugar, eggs.
    My tongue still worked. Maybe the pure, sweet taste of a petit four could slip by my nose. I left the store, lifted the lid of the box, and pulled one out, then licked the top. Smooth and, yes, sweet. No question about it. I let it melt in my mouth while I tried to conjure up the taste. Butter, sugar, eggs.
    But something was throwing it off. Confused by phantom smells, my tongue couldn't think straight either. I quickly swallowed the rancid lump and left the rest of the petits fours alone, unmolested, their virginity intact. Christmas Eve would bring another onslaught of aromas twisted beyond deciphering. Candles, wine, the roast tenderloin I'd most likely leave on my plate (a treat for Mel). Even the evergreens heaped in the center of the table would reek.

    Sweetened foods are the most tolerable when you can't smell, probably because sugar is the least ambiguous of tastes and utterly without flavor. It is also the likeliest to come in the form of smooth and soothing, reliably unambiguous textures. Yogurt, ice cream, applesauce, certain fruits ... petits fours.
    To impress on her psychology students the relationship between taste and smell, Rachel Herz had them taste jellybeans with their eyes and their nostrils closed. Without being able to smell anything, the students found that the candies all tasted identical. No differentiating flavor. When the students unplugged their noses and popped the candies into their mouths—still no peeking—they were able to tell lemon from licorice, and bubble gum from grape.
    Taste is said to be 90 percent smell—but only in humans. The secret to savoring, and why only humans do it, is flavor.
Taste,
then, is a misnomer. Some animals have lots of taste buds (and many different kinds), and some animals have none. Dogs can taste sugar but not salt. While humans can enjoy and even identify tens of thousands of
flavors,
we're able to detect only five
tastes.
Each taste has its own patch of tongue real estate—if the tongue were a residential lot, the bitter-taste taste buds would hang out in the backyard and the sour-taste ones in the shade on either side of the house. Salty and sweet tasters would be those more gregarious types clustered around the front gate, waving at complete strangers.
    The taste buds depend on smell to make bitter, sweet, sour, salty, and umami worth much. (Umami is monosodium glutamate, or MSG, common in Asian food and often blamed for headaches by Americans. Some scientists now think that American brains are more likely reacting to its novelty rather than to anything innately allergenic or potentially harmful in the chemical itself.) Manufacturers of pet foods hype their flavorful doggy treats with the human consumer in mind. Obviously, no dog in its right mind is going to turn up its nose at a sweet or the remains of your dinner, although it's all the same to the dog if you had meat loaf or chicken tetrazzini. One olfactory expert put it this way: "When it comes to tracking the scent of a gazelle on the savannah, we can't compete with our hounds, but once we drag it back to the campfire we can sure season the hell out of it."
    In humans those five basic tastes deliver the perfect gustatory package to complement the odorants rushing up the nose to the olfactory bulb. Psychologist Richard Stevenson called this associative learning. A couple of exposures to a