Season to Taste (27 page)

Next, Grosinger and I paused in front of a row of glass cabinets hanging on the wall stacked with larger bottles—cabinets that they call the “flavor library,” which consists of dozens of finished flavors ready, if they need them, to go. These are flavors that Grosinger has made, mixtures of dozens of chemicals from the other side of the lab, their formulas locked in the computer system, accessible to only a select few. Each of the bottles was labeled with familiar names: mango, fruit punch, orange creamsicle, white chocolate.

She pulled out a bottle of jasmine and waved the cap under my nose. It was a familiar scent—that of tea, of flowers. Then, Grosinger pulled down a jackfruit flavor. This is one of her favorites. Grosinger first tasted the large and starchy tree-borne fruit while traveling for work in Brazil, where Citromax has another location. I inhaled over its cap. It smelled tropical, sweet.

“What is the flavor of jackfruit?” I asked.

She thought for a moment.

“It’s custardy and banana-like,” she said. “It’s a little bit spicy and fruity, with a cinnamon note, maybe a bit of sulfur. It’s very sweet.” I could only marvel at her ability to put taste and smell to words.

When Grosinger travels, she tastes. The stranger, the more exotic, the better. She has eaten dragonfruit and jackfruit. Starfruit and the Brazilian superfruit cupuaçu. She’s eaten pitanga, also known as the surinam cherry, and caju, the conical-shaped sulfur-smelling fruit with bright orange skin that grows on the cashew tree, the same that produces the nut. She writes down the details of everything that she has tasted so that she can re-create them later. Tropical fruits like these have inspired many flavors for her back in the lab. “Everyone is looking for the next new flavor,” she told me, even if this flavor is not based on reality. “There are only so many bananas and strawberries you can do.”

Fantasy flavors, Grosinger said, may carry names of real fruit or flavors, but can taste nothing like nature. Also called “white space” flavors, and common on the shelves of grocery stores, they are flavors that do not correlate with anything that exists in reality. There is mango-acai and jackfruit-guava. Red Bull. Coca-Cola. Sprite. Fruit punch. Even strawberry-kiwi, that familiar flavor, is a fantasy. Pioneered by Snapple, it was seen as cutting-edge when first released. Even everyday, familiar flavors have an element of fantasy—the strawberry found in yogurt, or the grape of grape soda, of Kool-Aid, of Smucker’s jelly. I had never really thought about how different these fruit products I ate as a child were from the real fruit. But it’s true for many flavors. A peppermint-flavored hard candy does not resemble the fresh herb. A key-lime-flavored ice cream tastes little like the juice from the fruit. “Americans have been programmed to think that the candy lime flavor is real,” the technician who operated Citromax’s mass spectrometer and gas chromatograph told me. “If they eat a candy that tastes like real lime, ‘something is off,’ they’d say.”

Fantasy can go even further. I interviewed Marie Wright, a chemist with International Flavors and Fragrances known for her simple and elegant flavors, a month after my first meeting with Grosinger. Wright has worked on a number of wild projects, including a collaborative one with a group of artists—among them painters, sculptors, and chefs. For this, she invented a flavor for “orgasm,” which tasted like chocolate with an evocative, musky note. Completing that project, she told me, gave her confidence to go further. “Now, if someone came and said something like ‘what would be the taste of electricity?’ I could come up with something.”

“What
would
electricity taste like?” I asked.

“I would probably put tingly things so that you would get that sensation in your mouth, so that your mouth would tingle,” she said after a moment. “I think for me something that would be electrifying would be citrus zest. And maybe a little metallic. It would have to be quite surprising, wouldn’t it?”

But every flavorist has a different style, like all artists, using their materials in different ways, to different ends, and fantasy flavors can be tame or wild or anywhere in between. For Grosinger, fantasy can be a slight tweaking of a flavor based on reality—like removing a bit of the gritty taste to the acai berry. Once I asked her for an example of something fantastical she might do: pink grapefruit, she said. If she were to make a pink grapefruit flavor perhaps she would add a black pepper aspect. “Why not?” she said. “Might as well try it. Grapefruits do have that spicy note.”

Toward the end of the day in the lab I sat at the small table in Grosinger’s office and opened a big, thick black binder. It was creased in places, falling apart in others. The pages were brittle and old. Grosinger had handed it to me, instructing me to read. It was the book in which she had written out every single chemical—hundreds of them, in spindly ballpoint pen, one per page—years ago, when she first began work at IFF. On each chemical’s page, she had listed all of the adjectives that came to mind when she first tasted them. She wrote about where she thought each one could be used. Under her entry for “eugenol methyl ether,” she wrote that she smelled “subtle spice, clove-like but not as strong, sharp. Dirty, earthy note (perhaps a touch of sassafras, charcoal).” For its taste, in unsweetened water: “spicy, warm, musty clove note, but subtle and warm.”

This book was her training manual. It was how she learned to smell. I flipped through the pages, one by one, entranced. I was fascinated by her attention to detail, by the techniques used to internalize such invisible force. As I read, I thought of Laudamiel, and the box of raw perfume materials he had given me those months before. I thought of how I had left them on the shelf above my desk, pulling them out every so often, but remaining too frustrated to give it an honest shot. I thought about what I should do next.

BACK IN NEW YORK CITY,
thoughts of maltol and benzaldehyde infiltrated my mind as I stood by the stove ready to cook. In the days after my first visit to Citromax I had begun to look at everything consumed around me. I realized how much of Grosinger’s work had long been part of my life. A stick of gum or packet of hot chocolate, that glass of cranberry juice, cold and refreshing after a run: natural and artificial flavorings included.

Although I respected the art of her science and the complication of the formulas for flavor, I wanted simplicity in my own kitchen. I felt best when I could combine a handful of known, good-quality ingredients to create something everyone would love. All it took was a chicken, some butter, and salt. Or perhaps a few eggs, Gruyère cheese, a dusting of herb. Chocolate, sugar, yolk. I let ingredients stand alone, like that bottle of Italian olive oil, like fresh ricotta cheese. And I felt calm in the kitchen. I loved to sit at the table with an easy, home-cooked meal and eat with Matt.

Matt could barely make grilled cheese, but he loved to eat, and he loved to eat good food. He had no interest in fancy restaurants, artisanal butter, or the techniques of boning a duck. The thought of paying $20 for a hamburger, as one can do in New York City, made him shake his head in disbelief. He grew up in New Orleans, where his mother fried catfish for dinner and where every spring he and friends devoured tubs of spicy crawfish boiled with potatoes and corn. He spent five years as an officer in the army, eating in mess halls in Germany and Iraq, surrounded by colleagues, always with friends. Matt appreciated the communal aspect to food and could readily rejoice in flavor—even if it was a flavor I didn’t understand, like that of the plump little Vienna sausages that came in a can, which I watched him eat with his fingers and then happily lick clean. I loved him for that.

The simplicity and heartiness of our meals together reminded me why I loved food in the first place. For many of the years I had been obsessed with cooking, I had pined after fancy meals, been wrapped up in the taste of truffles, my arms up to the elbows in chanterelles and pork confit at the bistro in Boston. I had followed celebrity chefs and purchased cookbooks highlighting recipes that required equipment I couldn’t afford. But at our table, I toned it down. I relaxed. I concentrated on small numbers of ingredients. I chose recipes for their flavor as well as their ease, the kind that brought us together and left us uncluttered and full.

I cooked pots of beef stew and served it in bowls of buttered noodles. No cis-3-hexenol there. Just carrots, onions, and potatoes. Garlic, tomato, and a splash of red wine, a package of stew meat that I trimmed and cubed. I braised chicken and roasted pork, sautéed kale with caramelized onions, and served leaves of butter lettuce with toasted pecans and lemon vinaigrette. I cooked with ingredients that I could recognize, that I could count on my fingers. I wanted my kitchen to smell of home.

One freezing evening in February, I emerged from the subway at dusk. I moved slowly up the steps out of the station, a paper shopping bag filled with groceries dangling from the soft crease of my elbow. I had picked up half pounds of ground pork and beef, garlic and canned tomatoes at a market uptown. I planned to cook a spicy pasta sauce with basil, oregano, and a touch of red wine. I smiled as I walked down the block heading east, a little spring to my step. Just that week Matt and I had found a bright, big apartment near where he worked, and I delighted in imagining how I would arrange the couch in the living room when we moved in the following month. I was already planning the menu for our first dinner party. There would be lamb—roasted, with a rosemary-mustard glaze—and some new potatoes boiled, served with butter and dill. A glorious apple tart. We were looking forward to spring.

As I passed Union Square I heard the familiar ping of a text message registering on my phone. It was from Matt.

“You need to call me now,” it read.

Strange,
I thought. I shifted my bag along my arm so that I could dial. It only rang once, and when Matt answered his voice was low in my ear.

“Something happened.”

“What?” I asked, but he wouldn’t answer. He sounded strange.

“Just come home.”

I walked quickly across town, tendrils of fear floating behind. Had he been fired? Had our apartment fallen through? Had someone died?

Matt was sitting on the stoop to our apartment building. He wore a thin button-down shirt and no gloves. I could see him from a block away.

“What happened?” I asked as I approached, my voice a few notes higher than I meant. Matt looked at me for a moment, silent, his lips purple in the frozen February air.

“Just remember that I love you,” he said.

I stood in front of him, the corner to the grocery bag suddenly digging sharply into my side.

“You’re scaring me.”

“My mom called . . .” he began. “She got a letter in the mail.” A FedEx package had arrived at his parents’ home in New Orleans that afternoon. Inside, there was a letter addressed to Matt. It was from the army.

Matt had been in his senior year at West Point when the World Trade Center, fifty miles down the Hudson, had collapsed and his expectation of a career as an officer in a time of peace crumbled. Under contract, he owed the army eight years of service after graduation. The first five of those were active duty, which he had split between Germany and Iraq and already completed when we met. For the final three, however, he was free to exit the service and live as a civilian. Unless, that is, he was needed.

The letter that Matt’s mother received from the army contained orders. Matt had been recalled to duty.

It hadn’t even crossed my mind that this was a possibility. After all, it had only been twenty-three days since President Obama was sworn into office. Even the man who sold us the papers at the corner store that morning had acknowledged the hope floating through the air. But in the face of an escalating conflict in Afghanistan and a continuing force present in Iraq, the army needed manpower. They needed it immediately.

“I have to report for duty in April,” he explained, slowly, reading the shock on my face. Two months from now.

“And then I’ll go back to Iraq. I’ll go to Afghanistan. I don’t know.”

“For how long?”

“Four hundred days,” he said.

I sat down next to him on the stoop, felt his arm squeeze tight around my shoulders, a shiver against my side. I could hear the voices of two women walking by, the deep growl of a truck as it stopped down the block. I watched as men and women bundled in winter coats, wearing hats and gloves, talking on cell phones or walking tiny dogs passed us one by one. I stared at Matt’s dark blue sneakers. I wondered if he had come home from work and changed before coming outside to wait for me, or if those were the ones on his feet when he left that morning. I wondered why that mattered. I wondered if he could smell my fear. We sat in silence.

“Just remember that I love you,” he said, again.

I looked at him—his brown-blond stubble, his eyes dark with disappointment. He looked younger than his twenty-nine years. Too young to face the possibility of death. Again.

“I love you too,” I said.

He kissed me, warm against my numb face.

“Let’s go inside.”

That night, snuggled up in bed, I breathed in his smell—of sweat, of skin, of shampoo—trying to memorize it, to store it for later, when I would need it.

In the morning we called family and friends. I began to think of the myriad details that would need tending. Matt would have to leave his job. I would need a new apartment, a smaller one, one that I could afford on my own. I didn’t know how to begin, so I went to the kitchen. I would cook. That was something I could do.

I took out a sauté pan, a stick of butter, and a carton of eggs. I fried four for breakfast. They were crisp around the edges and the yolks, bright yellow. They smelled of butter, of farm, of mornings in Africa years past. We ate them with toast and coffee. I felt strangely calm.

IN THE HECTIC DAYS
following Matt’s news, I could suddenly smell
everything
. I didn’t notice the scent of new things. It wasn’t like that first aromatic burst of New York City, when the new tumbled back in with the strength of the old. It was the intensity that changed. The more I began to fear his leaving, to fear his time in uniform and under fire, the more I found I could smell . . . everything.