Remembering Smell (12 page)

Born in Provence in 1846, Escoffier gave up his boyhood dream of becoming a painter to focus on a career that was more reliably remunerative but no less artistically challenging. Though he never attended a university, he understood that the enjoyment of food was part training and part biology. Instinct (or perhaps the word is
genius
) told him that his beef bourguignon would taste even better if he engaged the diners' other senses as well. To turn novice eaters into discriminating gourmets, Escoffier tapped into hearing and sight to enhance the pleasurable experience of his food. What he intuited was that the brain handicapped unpleasant memories. Clever evolution. Any mild displeasure at the dinner table would be selectively erased from the record if the
overall
impression was delight. Violinists strolled among tables adorned with gorgeous arrangements of fruits, flowers, and feathers. Not only was each dish perfect; so was each plate. Diners took unconscious mental note of the fine crystal glasses, the sterling silver candelabra, the crisp linens, and the smiling company.

Jump ahead to twenty-first-century cuisine: Chicago's Alinea. Even before the restaurant is entered, Alinea challenges every hard-wired expectation of going out to dinner. Located in a hip but by no means opulent neighborhood, it lacks outdoor signage (unless you count the tiny type on the valet-parking stand). Sliding glass doors softly swish open to welcome guests. The walls are gray, the restrooms black. Gray carpeting dulls the sound of servers' feet, a good thing, since the wait staff nearly outnumber the clientele and are not really servers so much as performers. A different one appears with each course, first to deconstruct the dish and then to advise on how it should be smelled and (with the help of custom-designed tools for which the word
utensils
does not suffice) tasted. The sommelier is busy too, flitting from table to table like a honeybee from flower to flower in a fragrant garden, presenting the wine specially chosen for the course. The open-to-view kitchen is meant to be admired not for its hustle and bustle but for the Swiss-watch precision of the sizable kitchen staff, who work noiselessly at long stainless steel counters that give the room the look of a surgical unit. Even during the mealtime rush, one employee devotes all of his time to pushing a silent carpet sweeper up and down between the prep tables, picking up any lint or lettuce leaves that have fluttered to the floor. The impression of obsessive cleanliness belies what the place is about. Cooking is messy. On the walls of the kitchen hang sketches created by the chef to help his staff visualize—imprint on their souls, really—his menu, which changes constantly. Ask for the restaurant's signature dish and you will be told there is none.

Achatz goes even further than Escoffier. To focus diners' attention on smell, the chef created a space where the simple dé- cor is part of the game; it's as cleansing to the brain as the dish called (with Alinea's usual understatement) Pear is cleansing to the palate. Pear consists of pungent eucalyptus leaves and berries served in a small white bowl. A sliver of the glistening pale gold fruit drenched in olive oil and black pepper is placed on a spoon inside the bowl. This is what you slide onto your tongue as the eucalyptus fumes waft up your nostrils. Long sprigs of fresh rosemary entertain you with their scent during the brief intervals when the servers are absent. Then it's on to Pork Belly (with iceberg lettuce, cucumber, and a Thai distillation); or Bacon (a single slice suspended from a trapeze and eaten with butterscotch, apple, and thyme); or Wagyu Beef with Achatz's interpretation of Al steak sauce (the spices are arrayed on the plate beside the shimmering red cube along with Potato and Chips). It is a relief to know that the chef—or Chef, as the servers refer to him—can laugh at himself.

In Grant Achatz's olfactory cuisine, a concept invented in Spain, smell besomes at times almost painfully delineated. Restaurant-goers generally like to dine surrounded by the din of clattering saucepans, laughter, and conversation—not in the hush of a church. But Alinea's patrons bring their appetites there precisely because it is the temple of cutting-edge multisensory cuisine, the most pure and rarefied of dining experiences, the ne plus ultra of eating.

When we arrived at Peter's for dinner the following weekend, I saw a copy of Achatz's cookbook on the coffee table. Flipping through the glossy pages, I could only gape at the exquisite compositions and try to imagine their divine scent. In
Alinea-Mosaic,
itself a work of art, the chef reveals his secrets for creating such unforgettable experiences—there is no other word—as Bay Leaf Bubbles; Pillow of Nutmeg Air; Yolk Drops with Asparagus, Meyer Lemon, and Black Pepper; Licorice Marinade; Chicken Skin with Black Truffle, Thyme, and Corn; and Chocolate Warmed to Ninety-four Degrees. Kuroge Wagyu is a blend of cucumber, honeydew, and lime sugar, a nougat of olfactory bliss.

Another call from Peter a few weeks later brought alarming news. Achatz's doctor had said the tumor must come out—the tumor and the tongue with it. Instead, the chef chose a draconian regimen of chemotherapy and radiation that would destroy his taste buds, leaving only his sense of smell to guide him in the kitchen. During the months of his treatment he relied on his sous-chefs to taste and then communicate what they'd tasted to their boss. Using his sense of smell along with the sous-chefs' gustatory information, the chef was able to produce formulations—
recipes
is far too prosaic a term—for wondrously delicious and original dishes, proof positive that flavor is essentially derived from combinations of smells, with taste playing an important, but far less complex, supporting role.

Achatz's staff marveled at the chef's stoicism and discipline and were amazed by the consistently sublime dishes he created but could not taste. Achatz ignored the pain and his doctor's prescription for rest and calm during his chemotherapy. He drove himself back and forth from the clinic to the restaurant until the treatments were done. The intense pace kept his mind on food and off mortality.

Some regarded him as heroic, others as daft. I considered him lucky.

O
NLY HUMANS DELIBERATELY
create smells. People compose tantalizing perfumes and then package them in luminous glass bottles that are often etched to catch the light and create patterns as mesmerizing and as evocative as the scent within. Perfumers blend nature's essential oils together to enlarge the olfactory options, and then, in order to have a still larger selection to choose from at a much lower cost, develop artificial smells that can both ape the originals and multiply the possibilities of various aroma blends.

The hundred-and-seventy-billion-dollar fragrance industry employs some of the world's most perceptive noses. Those who aren't in the lab composing new scents are dreaming up ways to use them out in the world. Fragrances specifically designed for a particular ambiance and clientele are lavished on customers entering stores from Smith & Hawken to Victoria's Secret.

Cleaning products are a huge niche for artificial scents but also an endangered one. People don't clean the way they used to. A University of Michigan study found that from 1965 to 2005, time spent on household chores was slashed by 40 percent. To entice both men and women to focus more attention on the hunt for dust bunnies and the pursuit of the gleaming toilet bowl, fragrance specialists introduced new scents into products made by such companies as Procter & Gamble and Clorox. New scents are auditioned in testing rooms designed with a particular scent-savvy consumer in mind (people the industry call "scent seekers"). At Procter & Gamble, Anita's Kitchen belongs to a well-to-do homemaker, judging by the presence of Corian countertops and stainless steel appliances. A hidden camera records the reactions of test subjects recruited to experience the kitchen's smell. These reactions are deconstructed by scent specialists. A furrowed brow, said one, is "problematic." A twitching nose? Not good. That means the subject is asking,
What smells?

The test subjects offer verbal opinions too, of course. More telling than what they say, though, is what they do—gestures, movement, facial expressions—in response to the scent, because the best scents toy with emotions without anyone's knowing it. If the test subject has to think about the odor, something's not right.

Even clean has its own smell. The trouble is, the smell of a clean space (devoid of odorizers, which clean freaks smell as a filth cover-up) isn't the same for everyone. Some say they want nothing but the smell of their own sweat to proclaim the housework done. They don't know their own noses. For these people, a faint whiff of bleach is the real closer. Clorox bleach comes in a variety of scents—it can smell like a spring meadow, or fresh linen, or lavender—but each of these is laced with a discernible whiff of ammonium chloride.

Some in the household-products industry are betting on ginger to carry the public into the next decade, just as the fragrance of fresh linen did the last. The growing brigade of anti-smell (and anti-housework) consumers may find the scent too edgy, though. Some specialists are putting their money on lavender vanilla, which is more soothing and thus better suited to a generation for whom housework may be redolent of unemployment.

What Febreze is to the hard-working middle class, Shalimar is to the ultra-rich. In terms of an olfactory art, perfume is even older than cuisine. In 2006, the
New York Times,
in a belated acknowledgment of that fact, hired its first-ever perfume critic. Better late than never. Perfume is part of everyday discourse in many European countries. Perfume journals are sold on newsstands in Paris, Rome, and Madrid. My friend Felip grew up near Barcelona, on the Mediterranean coast. A poet, he landed a university teaching job in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Only the name of the place is romantic; St. Cloud itself is as far removed from Barcelona as black is from white. It is cold and snowy seven months out of the year. An hour from the Twin Cities, it began as a farming outpost populated by practical Germans and is now infected by the worst kind of sprawl.

Picture a slight, openly gay man from southern Spain on this stark landscape. To remind himself of home he wears a bandanna around his neck that is doused in his favorite perfume, a strongly citrus scent that's light and fresh. He sprayed some on my wrist once. (This was just a few months before I lost my sense of smell.) The liquid ran down my arm and gave off a strong aroma of alcohol at first, out of which emerged smells that struck me as brilliant—as perfectly composed as a well-crafted musical phrase or a poem. I admired the beauty of the cut-glass bottle it came from, tall, a perfect oval shape, with a soft cushionlike dispenser that Felip took great delight in rubbing between his thumb and forefinger. He asked me if I knew how perfume reacted chemically with the skin. It had not occurred to me that it did. Does fragrance change with one's emotional state? Does it pick up the scent of nervousness that no doubt bubbles up through one's pores with perspiration? He was entranced with fragrance, Felip said, and more striking than his fascination was how unabashed he was about telling me so. Clearly such a statement would not be surprising in a place like Barcelona, not only because Barcelona is a cosmopolitan city but also because of its location, its temperate climate, and its age. The streets of Barcelona have been perfumed with strong man-made scents since ancient times. Food spices and sacred scents mingled in its open markets and in its perfumes. Over the centuries that scent acquired new smells from Italy, North Africa, Turkey, Persia, and the Far East, and Felip now equates it with home.

I told Felip that a family trip we took to Europe when I was a child had awakened me to smell. As I stood in the Old Quarter of Casablanca, our first stop, my nose was assaulted by smells of heavily spiced meats roasting on spits in the open-air market, live animals sweating and defecating in the street, incense and exotic perfumes, and fresh fruit rotting in the torpor of a Moroccan summer afternoon. The smells were set to music as strange and terrifying to me as the ubiquity of blinded eyes and toothless smiles, deformities, blemishes, and child beggars with bony arms and legs and stomachs swelled by malnutrition. As we moved north to Gibraltar, Messina, Naples, and Rome, I noticed that the still pervasive odors of poverty and heat were infused with delicious food smells. My nose was beginning to adjust. Taste helped it along. By the time we arrived in Venice, my fear of the unfamiliar had been vanquished and I found the mingled odors of urine and mildew clinging to the wet stones intoxicating. I thought Italian pasta was the best food on earth. The olfactory shock that had had me in tears in the Casbah, begging to be put on a plane back to America, was gone. Europe had won over my impressionable young nose.

Up until the twentieth century, perfumes were made from essential oils distilled from plants; these organic molecules are called esters. In 1906 an English chemist named William Perkin received a knighthood for creating the world's first synthetic odor molecule: a test-tube-made copy of coumarin, which is a combination of plant extracts that has the pleasant fragrance of new-mown hay. After that, artificial scents took over from essential oils, and not just in perfumery. We have Perkin to thank for scented fabric softeners and deodorants as well as the new-car smell, without which taking home that shiny Honda just wouldn't be the same.

Perfumers still rely on petroleum products to extract fragrance from plants. Ko-Ichi Shiozawa, chief perfumer at Aveda (the company that made aromatherapy mainstream back in the eighties and nineties), is looking for alternative plant-based solvents. Shiozawa wants to wean the fragrance industry from its dependence on three thousand synthetic chemicals. His best effort so far is Yatra, an all-organic blend of Bulgarian lavender, soft Australian sandalwood (harvested by Aborigines), and South African geranium rose oils.

Another innovation in perfumery came in 2008. It didn't advance fragrance chemistry but it did take advantage of smell as a memory trigger. A New York clothing designer named Jessica Dunne smelled a market for scents that had a calming effect. Rather than relying on the usual relaxation herbs (lavender and so forth), Dunne decided to use old-fashioned flowery fragrances, the kind Dunne's grandmother Ellie had always worn. Just being around Ellie calmed Jessica down. She reasoned that lots of women her age (early thirties) had similar relationships with older women, or at least fantasies of days gone by that could be captured in the scents of an earlier generation. Why not bottle that?