Season to Taste (35 page)

Authors: Molly Birnbaum

BOOK: Season to Taste

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When we finally sat at the table, my leg ached and the asparagus had already grown cold. Sweat caused my T-shirt to cling to the small of my back. I looked at the kitchen behind me, with its greasy counters and dirty pans piled in the sink.

But we poured two glasses of red wine and toasted ourselves. “To home,” he said, lifting his up, clinking it against mine. I took a sip, which tasted familiar, a burgundy bronze. I willed my frustration away. The food was plain, and the kitchen a mess, but Matt was home and I was cooking. We began to eat.

I had forgotten the butter in the sauce, and left the Parmesan untouched and unremembered in the fridge. The asparagus was a bit tough, and the sweet potatoes, plain. But I could taste the green to the vegetable, the tangy citrus bite. I could taste the earth of the mushrooms, and the sweet depth to the Marsala wine. I relished the heat of the potato and the glisten of butter against its orange flesh. For a moment, I didn’t think about the flavors I could not detect, or what their absence meant. This plate, this bite, this breath—right here, right now, they didn’t need to make sense. I looked at Matt, who sat comfortably across from me, happy and near. We laughed as we ate. We clinked together another glass of wine. We both scraped our plates clean.

Acknowledgments

This book began many years ago, as a desperate attempt to understand what had happened to my sense of smell, and what it would be like to live without it. I started to report and to write because that felt less terrifying than waiting, which was all I was told to do. I could not have gotten very far without help. Lots of help. For every single person who was generous with his or her time, interest, e-mail, money and, most important, encouragement: thank you. I have never felt so humbled and so lucky as I have while working on
Season to Taste
.

Thank you, first, to all of the scientists who took the time—lots of time, multiple times—to meet with me and explain (and re-explain) his or her work, especially Richard Doty, Stuart Firestein, Rachel Herz, and the folks at Monell.

Thank you to all of the experts who let me step into their worlds and their work: Oliver Sacks, whose knowledge seems to have no bounds, and Ron Winnegrad, whose kindness has touched my life much further than this book. To Christophe Laudamiel, Robert Pinsky, Ellie Kellman-Grosinger and everyone in her lab, Laurence Fauvel and the whole crew at the Grasse Institute of Perfumery. To Grant Achatz: I will never forget that meal.

And, of course, thank you to all of the anosmics who spoke with me and e-mailed with me, opening their lives to my pen, allowing all of us to feel a little less alone. To Debbie and Robbi, Matthew and Bobby. Especially to Vito, who, I’m so happy to report, has almost completely regained his normal sense of smell.

This book crystallized under the watchful eyes of Sam Freedman and Kelly McMasters, phenomenal teachers who challenged me to reach further than I thought I could. It would have been impossible without Anna Stein, who believed in it, and Matt Weiland, whose tireless edits and almost inhuman enthusiasm, made it real. Also to Dan Halpern, Rachel Bressler, Allison Saltzman, and all the rest at Ecco; and to Janet Hill, whose beautiful work appears on the front cover, and to Suet Yee Chong, who did the interior—thank you, thank you all.

Thank you to all members of Neuwrite, to Erin Savner, who read the manuscript with a watchful neuroscience eye, and to Therese Ragen, who listened to me babble about smell for years. To the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, to DW Gibson, and to the folks at the Ledig House for giving me the space and the silence to write. To all the good friends who cooked with me, ate with me, and distracted me when I needed to escape: Becca, Katia, Ben, Philissa, Sarah, Emily, Ashley, Jon, and David, to name only a few. Thank you to Alex, whose generosity and spirit have pushed me to be better since the first day we met.

Finally, thank you to Mom, Dad, and Ben, to Cyndi, and to Charley: you all have picked me up from my lowest and kept me standing at my most confused. And thank you to Matt, who read every page of this book, multiple times, even from the mountainous wastelands of Afghanistan. I would be lost without you all.

About the Author

MOLLY BIRNBAUM
is a recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship in Arts and Culture from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Her work has appeared in the
New York Times
and
ARTnews
magazine, and she writes the popular food blog My Madeleine. She lives in Boston.

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Credits

Jacket design by Allison Saltzman
Jacket painting by Janet Hill

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint from “Sonnet in Search of an Author” by William Carlos Williams, from
The Collected Poems: Volume II, 1939–1962,
copyright © 1962 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Carcanet Press Ltd.

SEASON TO TASTE.
Copyright © 2011 by Molly Birnbaum.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-0-06-191531-4

EPub Edition © July 2011 ISBN: 978-0-06-208150-6

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