Taste, Flavor, and Enticing Cocktails for People Who Can’t Smell or Taste
It’s Dante’s Inferno for me, I told a new friend at the opening cocktail party at SmellTaste 2019, a conference for people with anosmia — the inability to smell — hosted in May by the University of Florida Center for Smell and Taste (UFCST) and UK non-profit, FifthSense. Dante’s Inferno was one of the four finalist drinks in a cocktail challenge issued by UFSCT Director Steven Munger: create a cocktail to appeal to people who can’t taste or smell.
The finalists based their drinks on a seminar for bartenders about the science of smell and taste, and how to enhance their creations using sensations other than smell. The resulting four finalist cocktails incorporated elements of what Munger calls the sensory toolkit; in addition to smell, there’s taste, texture, temperature, piquancy/spiciness and appearance.
One of the particular challenges for me when I lost my sense of smell after a virus two years ago, was adjusting the parts of my social life that revolved around meeting friends for cocktails. My favorite Pinot Noir tasted sour, craft beer was just foul, and Scotch triggered an aftertaste of burnt toast. Margaritas or Palomas — simple, sour and with a salty rim — were all I could bear. I was looking forward to the cocktail challenge opening more options for me, as well as meeting others who shared my condition.
In the function area of the conference hotel lobby, I raised my glass, half-sized because we were to taste all four, and got an immediate kick from the “fire spiced” rim. Hot and spicy is actually not a function of taste, it’s the response of the trigeminal nerve, the three branched cranial nerve behind your face. That tingle of heat from jalapeño, mustard or horseradish, the sharp rush from mint, ginger or cumin, the sting of the odor of chlorine or ammonia, even tears from raw onion, are actually pains signals sent by the trigeminal nerve. Since I’ve become anosmic, I like spicy things more than ever because it is a gustatory experience I can still have.
Until I lost my sense of smell, I was not aware of how integral our sense of smell is to the perception of flavor. Your mom knew this instinctively when she told you to hold your nose to swallow icky-flavored medicine. A fun way to test this how smell influences flavor is to get a handful of jellybeans. Hold your nose and chew one– you’ll taste the sweetness, but won’t be able to identify the flavor until you free your nose.
Smell is more complex than one might realize. What we commonly think of as smell — sniffing in an odor through the nose — is called orthonasal olfaction, and is only part of the process. The second way of smelling happens in the mouth, and is responsible for our ability to detect flavor. Called retronasal olfaction, it starts with chewing, which sends odor molecules from the mouth to the nose via the throat. When these odor molecules hit the olfactory receptors, the brain uses that input to create flavor. Because they can’t smell, anosmics cannot experience the complex sensory experience that is flavor.
But anosmics can taste. Since we often use the word taste and flavor interchangeably, it is useful to delineate. Flavor is what our brains create from taste and smell, as well as mouthfeel, texture, temperature, piquancy/spiciness, and appearance. Taste is what happens on the tongue.
Before I lost my sense of smell, my previous knowledge of taste was the tongue map that I’d dutifully studied in high school science, memorizing the positions of the then four taste receptors; sweet in the front, salty and sour on the sides and bitter at the back. It turns out that the tongue map is bogus, a bad data visualization of a not very rigorous experiment.
The tongue map is based on an experiment by a German scientist in 1901, who asked some volunteers to self-report their responses to basic tastes. Based on their perceptions, he concluded that sensitivity varied around the tongue. In 1942, Edwin Boring, a Harvard psychology professor, took the raw data that represented relative sensitivities and plotted it on a graph. But the translation from graph to map was not an accurate depiction. The areas of the tongue where those German volunteers reported less taste detection of a particular taste were shown as having no sensitivity at all.
The tongue map was immortalized in textbooks for several decades, until Virginia Collings, a scientist specializing in sensation and perception revisited the tongue map in 1974. She found that while here are some areas of heightened sensitivity, all tastes could be detected anywhere on the tongue. So I can taste the salt from the rim of my cocktail not just on the side of my tongue but all over it.
Scientists now agree that from anywhere on our tongues we can sense all five tastes — sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami (savory) — and suspect there are more. There’s some evidence of fatty taste receptors, and emerging research on potential alkaline and metallic receptors.
My Dante’s Inferno is delightfully foamy from shaken egg whites in the drink. I can detect something that’s pleasingly savory, and deduce it is the specialty Scotch, Fire & Cane, from Glenfiddich, a sponsor of the SmellTaste challenge event. Another few sips and I could recognize the Montenegro Amaro Liqueur, an almost citrus-y digestif. A downtown bartender once told me his secret for Palomas was to add a splash of that bitter.
In truth I cast my vote for Dante’s Inferno for the taste and the name. Losing my sense of smell, which I wrote about here, has been a spiral through circles of hell. I’ve felt detached from my world, depressed, insecure about personal hygiene, reticent where I once was an avid cook, and cut off from so many things that once brought me joy.
But it is another cocktail, created by the mixologist at the conference hotel, that garnered the most votes. The Speyside Sand and Sangre used Glenfiddich 12 Scotch as its base and had a subtle bite from the Ancho Reyes Chile Liqueur. It was what the mixologist called the treats that set it apart. Floating atop the cocktail was a cherry-citrus foam, which provided superior mouthfeel (but a little too sweet for me). The show-stopper was the carbonated fruit — oranges slices and cherries — a surprising and bright pop in the mouth, an effervescence he created by infusing CO2 using emptied beer kegs.
When you can’t smell or taste, socializing sometimes seems like a cruel tease. As much as I enjoy my friends and family, there’s an undertow of feeling that something is missing when I can’t savor the food and drink. There’s no cure yet for anosmia, so I try not to focus on the loss. Instead I revel in the joys of good conversation and shared experiences, plus those elements in the sensory toolkit: a stealthy kick of pepper, salt, glorious salt, and if I’m lucky, something effervescent.
