Instructions
Our sense of flavour is a complex thing, spanning issues of culture, geography, ethnicity and individual physiology. What tastes delicious to one person can be abhorrent to another. This is the varied genius of our humanity, and the bane of a chef’s life.
Years spent honing skills, weeks spent devising menus, days spent sourcing ingredients, hours spent in preparation all come down to a single ethereal moment. And it’s a moment beyond our control.
But it’s not the first taste, in fact it comes before. Situated approximately thirty centimetres form the mouth is a point marked in culinary cartography as the ‘Great T’. This is location where we delineate ‘Taste’. Great T is the crossover point between food as seen, and food as tasted. It is the very first true gastronomic aroma – in precise terms, it is smell with intent to eat!
Despite the protestations of the governing foodocrats, little can occur after passing Great T that will change a diner’s core perceptions of a meal. The nuances will certainly come into play, but the broad tone is defined. Meals may grow on you, but only from the qualified base. It is for this reason, if no other, that while abstract presentation and obscure flavours may be employed, chefs rarely risk the use of excessively strong aromas. They can be too polarising.
Of course, some of the world’s gourmet masters simply can’t help themselves, choosing instead to toy with diners, and rely on their native cookery talents to prevail. Heston Blumenthal has famously employed fermented aromas in dishes to challenge his guests. But in all cases these funky perfumes were coupled with one of three powerful counterbalances: coffee, liquorice or cucumber.
Coffee is clarifying, and is used by wine tasters to clear and reset the nose. Liquorice is all-powerful, quickly masking even the most wretched stench. Cucumbers, however, are clinically refreshing, permitting strong aromas to have context in which to thrive.
Unripe cucumbers, that is. For cucumbers are traditionally only eaten when an unripe green – they are too bitter when ripened and yellow.
While the range of cucumbers available have distinct flavours and contrasting degrees of bitterness, they have crispness and freshness in common. While devoid of aroma, they nonetheless play an integral role at Great T. Preconceptions about foods affect our expectations and the way we will actually interpret flavour. Orange-scented confit of duck will pass Great T with a foreboding of unctuous richness. Simply adding a shaving of cucumber will cajole the diner into perceiving the dish as lighter and more delicate. The fact that the dish tastes identical with or without cucumber is irrelevant – this is the true power of Great T.
But we should celebrate, not fear, this powerful culinary stage. Without it dining would be Em T.
Pan roasted kingfish with asparagus and cucumber salsa