Guest post: The smell of food

This is our 1,960th post on this site.  I think it might be my favourite so far. Liam Moore, a friend of mine with a sense of smell that would put a hound to shame, writes a very gorgeous blog about the scents of this planet, and he kindly agreed to write a guest post for us.

Inhaling the Earth
By Liam Moore

What is your favourite food? Where do you begin? If it was your last meal, what would you choose?

My friends and I were asking this to each other last week—right before we ordered pizza and a movie-marathon was kicking off. Naturally a majority of our answers were foods from home, “It’d have to be an Indian dish. That’s what I grew up on living in Wales.” Another friend said her dad’s Sunday roast. I said toasted soda bread smothered in real butter and a light spread of Bovril—side of tea. I began to have a déjà vu at this point. I had asked the same question months ago to another friend, only that time it sounded like, “What is your favourite food smell?”

Coming from Spain, he told me it was paella. It reminds him of any given Sunday. And whenever he catches a whiff of chicken, lamb or seafood paella, he would be transported right back to his family home with his parents, sister and grandparents. It’s almost time-travelling food, he told me.

That day, I told him my favourite food smell would have to be Sunday roast. And let’s be honest, if you’re a meat eater, the smell of a silverside joint cooking is animalisticly mouth-watering.

My mum would have got up around 7 or 8am most of the time and put the meat in the slow cooker ready for lunchtime. By 11am, this half raw, half cooked meat isn’t pleasant yet. There’s a weak juicy bloody smelling liquid surrounding the roast. But a few more sniffs, and it’s beginning to show signs of promise, of rich tempting gravy, soft flaky mouthfuls and crunchy nibbly end bits.

When I’d lift the lid off the slow cooker around 1pm, the strong, damp steam filled my nostrils and blanketed my face. Things were really smelling good. At 3pm the entire kitchen is a hodge-podge of vegetables steaming over a pot of potatoes and crisping golden roasties glowing through the glass oven door. The windows steamed in the kitchen and you couldn’t tell it was a grey, wet Sunday, but that didn’t matter.

We never ate round the dinner table either, sadly. Plates on laps and dreary Sunday afternoon tv was our gathering point. As a distraction, and just plain hungry, I’d forget what my food smelled like, and just dig in. But I always remember the preparation that went in. The strong cooking odours would be more powerful than the taste—no surprise there as smell is directly plugged in to the part of the brain that deals with emotions, memory and behaviour. I can even remember the smell of the starchy wooden chopping board as the just peeled, ready to be boiled potatoes would be placed. Or even the smell of questionably fragrant washing up liquid piercing out amongst the cloud of food smells. It’s always good to soak as you go!

I think we sometimes forget to stop and smell the food, at least I do. I look forward so much to the end result, that plate on my lap, that I forget to savour and experience other moments. Moments like the chopping of the parsley, the butter melting on the corn-on-the-cob, loaded with cracked black pepper too. There’s even that “Ahh” smell as the plate is under my nose and I’m seconds away from digging in. We stop and smell the roses, but do you stop to smell the food?