Season to Taste (17 page)

I could smell the yeasted honey, the oatmeal whole wheat. Perhaps I could not detect its aroma in its entirety, I thought. But I could smell it enough to feel warm. I inhaled until I thought my lungs would burst.

I took a fresh loaf over to my friend Ben’s house that evening for dinner. An aspiring chef who worked most nights at a high-end restaurant uptown, Ben and I loved to talk food. Along with his girlfriend, Philissa, we cooked and ate together often. At their table we devoured plates of duck breast sautéed in butter, delicate basil pancakes, and salmon cured by hand. There were buckwheat crepes and fennel salads and cinnamon doughnuts crunchy with a sugar coating, fried crisp in oil. But above all, there was laughter and companionship. At their table, I concentrated on the flavor I had only recently begun to retrieve. And while I doubted that I could taste everything, I did remember why I had valued the culinary in the first place: the togetherness, the happiness, the intimacy of place. Nourishment, I remembered, came from far more than taste and smell. Flavors were heightened with my happiness, pulsing with my friends.

“We should cook for more people,” Ben said one evening. “Like a restaurant, but at home.”

I took a bite of a basil pancake, which tasted of summer and herb.

“You
should,” I said, waving my fork in the air. “I mean, this is good. This is really good.”

“We
should,” he said, pointing to my ravaged loaf of bread, which had emerged from the oven with a thick bronze crust and soft, air-bubbled innards. “You can bake.”

I looked at him, my eyebrows raised. While I was still hesitant to attempt to cook savory dishes for crowds, ones that required constant attention to taste, I felt comfortable baking. I didn’t need a full sense of smell there. I only needed precision and patience. But did I trust myself to share my efforts beyond my inner group of friends?

“Seriously,” he said. “We love to cook; we love to feed people. Why not run a little restaurant here for a handful of friends? Like a dinner party but bigger, an ad hoc experiment for food lovers at home?”

He looked excited. A homegrown restaurant? I smiled.
Why not?

A month later I was awake at 6:00
A.M.
, the pale yellow dawn hardly visible through the kitchen window, my arms covered in flour, my oven filled with dough. My mixer stood ready. Steam from the teakettle left light clouds on the window nearby. A pan of focaccia bread, one that I had set to rise in the fridge the night before, lay on the kitchen table, dimpled and doused in olive oil and rosemary, waiting to be baked. I moved quickly, quietly around the room. I had twelve loaves to finish before noon, when I was due to arrive at the apartment where Ben and I would host the first meeting of our “supper club.” There was much to be done.

Ben and I had sent out an e-mail to friends and acquaintances soon after our first conversation. We were startled by the response. It seemed that we were not the only ones who loved the communal aspect to eating. We were not the only ones who wanted the nourishment of friends, the comfort of home. We capped the first “underground” dinner—a five-course spread, complete with my fresh bread and home-baked dessert—at twenty-eight guests.
How are we going to pull this off?
I wondered.

We prepared for a week. Ben played with homemade stocks, soups, and pickled vegetables. He debated buffalo versus steak. Trout versus tuna. Grits and risotto, morels and portabella. I played with raspberry gelées and peppered biscotti, gingersnaps and shortbread each night when I arrived home from work. Ice cream bases were created on a tipsy Friday at midnight.
Biga,
the fermenting bread base often used for Italian bread that I stored in plastic jars, littered my apartment’s refrigerator. I would bake individual chocolate cakes that oozed a dark molten dark center with the crack of a spoon against their flesh. I would serve them with scoops of caramel ice cream, just a touch of salt sprinkled on top. The hot and cold, salty and sweet: a dessert for those who could smell, and those who could not.

When I arrived at the apartment where we would cook that day, a small but open three-bedroom in Brooklyn, I could smell the neon-green pea soup already simmering on the stove. I could smell the grassy stalks of asparagus and the bright citrus to the oranges that had been peeled and sectioned on the table. We tasted one of the many loaves of bread that I had brought, carried in large shopping bags: cracked and crinkled, they had good crust and crumb. I felt confident for the first time in years.

“Here we go,” Ben said, as our guests began to trickle into the apartment in ones and twos around 7:00
P.M.
They were friends and friends of friends, ranging from teenagers to grandmothers, dancers and writers, businessmen and bankers, colleagues and comedians. Bearing bottles of wine they congregated in the dining room. Ben and I, sectioned off in the small kitchen by strategically placed tapestries, made our final preparations listening to the background sound of laughter and clinking glasses. Adrenaline coursed through my body. I remembered the moments before service at the Craigie Street Bistrot, when Maws would stand at his station, knife poised, waiting for the first order with studied calm.

“Let’s do it,” I said.

We raced through our work in the kitchen—grilling scallions, searing meats, spooning a nutty brown romesco sauce, poaching asparagus. Bent over the white dishes lined on an overturned bookshelf, we arranged each course on thick white plates, which we had rented from a party company the day before. The close quarters, the heat of the oven, and the constant desire for speed reminded me of Maws’s lair. Against the hum of chatter and dish, I concentrated on the immediate sizzle and sear, steam and boil. I could feel the heat of the oven, an occasional flash of burn as I grabbed pots and pans, the weight of plates in my hands as I took them out to the smiling eaters. I inhaled and exhaled—smelling, touching, working. Time flew.

I didn’t watch as the guests dug their spoons into the ramekins of steaming chocolate cake that we brought out at the end of the meal. Instead, I stood in the kitchen and I listened. I waited for a reaction, something beyond the clink of spoon on plate.

The room was quiet. Very quiet.

“Too quiet?” I asked Ben.

“No,” he said, peeking around the doorway. “I see smiles. I see plates licked clean.”

I MET OLIVER SACKS
on the sidewalk outside the Cornelia Street Café, a storied establishment with a bright red awning in Manhattan’s West Village, a few weeks after his letter arrived. It had come in a thick envelope, tucked between bills and magazines in my mailbox at the end of August. I tore it open on the stoop of my apartment building to find two pages of scrawling, spidery handwriting within. Sacks was interested in my nose. He wanted to meet.

I arrived at the café at the appointed time, a light late-summer evening, filled with tingling anticipation. As I walked down the sidewalk toward the café, smelling the vagaries of the street, the smoke, the trash, the sweet waft of air, I knew I was on my way to an important place. After all, I had conquered my fear. I had asked for help. And not only that: my request had been granted. I was on my way to understanding the sense of smell, en route to the beginning. Sacks could tell me what had happened; he could tell me what to expect. He would, too. After all, he did it in his books. And he had written me a letter.

Sacks stood on the sidewalk with his longtime assistant and editor, Kate Edgar, and a portable seat cushion in his hand. He had a kind, round face and a thick gray beard. I noticed that he wore a light blue T-shirt from Columbia University, where he had recently been appointed a university “Artist,” and the insignia across his chest was creased as if the shirt had just emerged from its wrappings.

I walked up to the scientist and introduced myself. “Molly,” I said, shaking his hand, a huge grin on my face. He smiled back. “Thank you for inviting me,” I said.

“My pleasure.” Sacks, who was seventy-five years old, spoke with a soft English accent. He moved to New York from London in 1965 to work at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx as a consulting neurologist. That was where he discovered the group of Parkinson’s patients who became the subjects of his book, later adapted into a film with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro,
Awakenings
.

I wasn’t sure what else to say, so I followed silently as we descended the stairs into a dark basement room in the café. We were there to see a lecture. It was one of the café’s “Entertaining Science” events, which Sacks had told me about in his letter. This one was called
Scents and Sensibility: How Your Nose Knows.
“You might find it helpful,” he had written to me.

We took the stairs in single file. As Sacks rounded the corner to the basement floor he glanced back. “Well,” he said, “I was very interested in your letter.” He spoke softly, stuttering a bit. I had once heard him give an interview on NPR in which he described himself as almost debilitatingly shy.

“I’m not working on anything to do with smell,” he said, looking back and above my head, squinting. I wondered if he was avoiding my gaze. “But I, I find it fascinating.”

I suddenly felt cold. His words were so casual. I didn’t want fascinating. Doesn’t he
know
?

In the basement, Sacks sat on his cushion against the wall. He seemed a bit overwhelmed in the dark, loud room. The crowd surrounding us chatted, swelling with noise and inching closer toward this celebrity scientist. He leaned over the table to talk. He spoke softly, and I yelled so that he could hear my response. He told me that he had been so interested in my letter because his own eyesight had rapidly diminished in recent months. Sometimes he could see things that were not there. Pineapples and sea creatures, lines waving like flowers in the grass.
We’re both living tales of loss,
he seemed to imply.
Ones that change the world around you.

A middle-aged woman wearing a red blouse and slacks approached.

“I just wanted to tell you how much your work has affected me,” she called out over the din.

He smiled gracefully. “Thank you.”

As the lights grew low, I tried to think of something to say. But I couldn’t.
He doesn’t know,
it echoed in my head
.
He doesn’t know
.

A spotlight hit the stage. The first presenter mounted the stairs. Sacks leaned in toward me again.

“This,” he said, gesturing with his hand, “should be interesting.”

The lecture began with Stuart Firestein, the Columbia University biology professor and smell scientist. He was followed by Christophe Laudamiel, a top perfumer at International Flavor and Fragrances. They spoke about the complication and beauty of the nose. Firestein talked about the neuronal construction of the nostrils, sinuses, and brain. Laudamiel explained the molecular makeup and inherent appeal of fragrance. The word
mystery
was thrown like confetti. It was the first time I heard experts speak on the subject. It was the first time I sat in a room filled with people dedicated to the topic of smell. I listened intently, surprised that there was so much that they didn’t know. I scribbled words with a ballpoint pen in the notebook I had cracked when the lights had dimmed, unable to see a thing through the café basement’s dark glaze. I kept my eyes focused on the PowerPoint slides flitting behind the speakers’ heads, concentrating but overwhelmed by the sudden influx of facts, ones that tore at the soft tunnel of my ignorance.

I had been thinking about smell for years, but I didn’t know the purpose of an olfactory receptor. I had no idea the perception of smell was determined by genes. The names Axel and Buck were new. But Sacks’s presence calmed me. He didn’t know, but even the experts didn’t know, not in that way, not in the way I wanted
.
Perhaps I would have to rely on myself.

Toward the end of the lecture, Laudamiel handed out samples of fragrances that he had created from scratch—different ones, nothing like the traditional scents sold in department stores. Laudamiel had been working on a series of scents based on
Perfume,
a best-selling novel by the German author Patrick Süskind, which had recently been turned into a film. It is a story of smell set in eighteenth-century France, one of intrigue and murder and mystery. It centers on a man named Grenouille who is born with no body odor but with an inhumanly keen sense of smell. Laudamiel had created the scents of specific scenes: of the cave where Grenouille hides, damp with stone, moss, and cold; of the best-selling perfume,
Amour and Psyche,
made by Grenouille in the book; of the scent of a young virgin girl, the one who drove Grenouille to such intoxication. For this scent, Laudamiel told members of the audience, many of whom tittered with amusement, he had used the chemical information gleaned from the belly button of an actual virgin, tested and determined at his Midtown lab. We smelled them carefully over thin white paper strips passed around the room. The details of these fragrances, which filled the room with a cloying aromatic glaze, were just a bit out of my perceptual reach. I inhaled and exhaled audibly and felt anxious and out of place. Only one sample stood out to me:
Paris 1738
. This particular fragrance was reminiscent of the streets of Grenouille’s Paris, which Süskind had described in all their fetid glory in the first pages of his book. These streets were foul with sewage and rank with wet stone. The sample reeked of sweat and dirt and disgust, swirling with cassis and pyrozine. I watched the faces of those around me when Laudamiel handed out these samples to sniff. I heard the gasps of amazement as the audience moved, simultaneously repelled and entranced.

When we left the café later that night, Sacks and I shook hands while standing amid a throng of people on the sidewalk outside. We spoke about the lecture, and promised to be in touch. As I walked toward the subway, the fading light swallowed by the fluorescence of city traffic and glowing neon signs, I thought about Sacks and scent, about science and its mysteries, about those who study them and why. I thought about what I would do next.