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 I fell in love with cooking when I was in college. I spent my days thinking about recipes, and my evenings cooking for friends. I lost myself in cookbooks, in food memoirs, in tomes about the science of meat. When I graduated, I knew that I wanted to be a chef.
Not long after I began working in a professional kitchen, and only a couple of months before my starting date at the Culinary Institute of America, however, I went for a jog near my home in Boston and was hit by a car. I don't remember the accident that broke my pelvis, fractured my skull and tore the tendons in my left knee. But I'll never forget the moment a few weeks later when I realized I had lost my sense of smell.
I've written a lot about the power of smell, its relationship to taste, and why I was lost without it in the kitchen. My book, "Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way," about the subject was published in June. Even here on Zester Daily there has recently been a piece on that very topic. But what surprised me in the weeks and months after the accident was not only the importance of scent, but the importance of all the senses in the kitchen, and how none of them should be ignored. When I couldn't smell, and therefore could not detect flavor in the foods I put into my mouth, I relied on touch, taste, sound -- and, especially, sight. Because despite the cliché, it's true: we eat with our eyes before our mouths.
Without a sense of smell, I could still detect the temperature and texture of food as I ate, and the sensations of salty, sweet, bitter, sour and umami from the taste buds my mouth. But there was nothing more. No herbs or spices. No flavor at all.
A craving for color
As the months passed and my body healed, I began once again to cook. It was difficult. Without a sense of smell, I could no longer "taste" as I went along. I didn't trust my nose or my mouth. But I could certainly see. I trusted my eyes. And in the kitchen, I looked. I stared. With my eyes, I followed the ingredients as they were changed by heat or cold. I could tell when nuts had finished toasting by their darkened exterior, when butter was browned by its transforming hue, when a cake was baked by its toasted top. I watched water come to a boil, salmon to turn from a glossy raw pink to a matte, white-speckled done. I baked a lot, confident in the pillows of dough that rose above the lip of the bowl in which I had laid them to rest. I watched egg whites whipped with sugar morph from liquid to foam to a cloud of cream that held stiff peaks on the end of the electric beaters.
My preference in food began to change. I craved color. I wanted whatever I cooked -- and ate -- to look good. If the food on my plate was pretty, or vibrant, or, hell, even just geometrically aligned, I enjoyed it more, felt it more, tasted it more despite the fact that I couldn't detect its full flavor.
After all, the sight of food is the first cue for eating, and for hunger. It's the first clue we have when we decide whether our ingredients or meals are good or not. "That looks great," I've often said as I sat down at the dinner table of a friend. This is why experiences like Dining in the Dark -- in which a diner eats in a pitch black restaurant or is blindfolded for a meal, forced to rely on his or her other senses -- are so unnerving, novel and wild. Evolutionarily, sight was an important way of telling if something was food, if it was ripe or rotten, if it was fruit or vegetable or root. In today's world of fast food and desk-bound eating, it's sometimes hard to take a step back and appreciate the senses, to take the time to really look before we eat.
The still life of food
My eyes saved me in the many months I could not smell at all. And I kept those lessons with me as my sense of smell slowly returned. It has been six years since the accident, and today I'm lucky to have recovered in full. But I cannot cook without thinking about the aesthetics of the plate that I am presenting, the still life of food on the canvas of a table. Chefs are often compared to artists, and I couldn't agree more.
The first time I went to a restaurant after the accident, I was still on my crutches. It was a cold, dark evening late in autumn. I followed my mother and her boyfriend toward the back of the dimly lighted, white-tableclothed bistro, feeling self-conscious about my knee brace, about my hobbled walk. I peered at the menu, unable to decide what to order, worried that I would not taste -- or enjoy -- a thing. In the end, I ordered a beet salad. I will never forget that salad. When the plate arrived at the table in front of me, I took a long moment simply to look. There were red, orange and yellow beets, glossy and round. They were cut into perfect slices, and arranged on the plate with finesse. There was the deep green of arugula, and the neon hue of pistachios. A whip of dark balsamic reduction. It was a simple beet salad, but unlike anything I'd had before. I looked at my plate, inhaling with my eyes.
Zester Daily Soapbox contributor Molly Birnbaum is a recipient of the Pulitzer traveling fellowship in arts and culture from Columbia University'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.
Photo: Molly Birnbaum. Credit: Matt Mabe
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