Taste: A Book of Small Bites 9780231554244

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Taste

NO LIMITS

NO LIMITS Edited by Costica Bradatan The most important questions in life haunt us with a sense of boundlessness: there is no one right way to think about them or an exclusive place to look for answers. Philosophers and prophets, poets and scholars, scientists and artists—all are right in their quest for clarity and meaning. We care about these issues not simply in themselves but for ourselves—for us. To make sense of them is to understand who we are better. No Limits brings together creative thinkers who delight in the pleasure of intellectual hunting, wherever the hunt may take them and whatever critical boundaries they have to trample as they go. And in so doing they prove that such searching is not just rewarding but also transformative. There are no limits to knowledge and self-knowledge—just as there are none to self-fashioning. Aimlessness, Tom Lutz Intervolution: Smart Bodies Smart Things, Mark C. Taylor Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense, Richard Kearney Inwardness: An Outsider’s Guide, Jonardon Ganeri Self-Improvement: Technologies of the Soul in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Mark Coeckelbergh

Taste Jehanne Dubrow

A BOOK OF SMALL BITES

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2022 Columbia University Press Lucille Clifton, excerpts from “cutting greens” from How to Carry Water: Selected Poems. Copyright © 1974, 1987 Lucille Clifton. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., boaeditions.org. Li-Young Lee, excerpts from “From Blossoms” from Rose. Copyright © 1986 Li-Young Lee. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., boaeditions.org. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dubrow, Jehanne, author. Title: Taste : a book of small bites / Jehanne Dubrow. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2022. | Series: No limits | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021053495 (print) | LCCN 2021053496 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231201742 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231201759 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231554244 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Taste—Philosophy. Classification: LCC BF261.D83 D83 2022 (print) | LCC BF261.D83 (ebook) | DDC 573.8/7801—dc23/eng/20220209 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053495 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053496

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Chang Jae Lee

Contents

Aperitif: And I Will Tell You What You Are 1 Sweet 13 The Eyes of the Two Were Opened 13 The Essence of Oneself 17 Such Hints of Honey 23 Who’s That Nibbling on My House? 28 Refined 31

Sour 39 Sweetest Things Turned Sourest 39 A Few Glittering Seeds 44 Sour and Unripe 50 An Acid Light 53

Salty 59 Tearless Centuries 59 First the Nose, Then the Tongue 62

CONTENTS Thirsty for Days 67 Cured in Brine 69

Bitter 73 Fragrant Thoughts 73 Small Cups of Shadow 77 Bitter Elixirs 80 The Bond of Living Things 86 Count Up the Almonds 90 Another Way of Saying Annihilation 93

Umami 99

vi

The Tiny Thread of Milk 99 A Foul Cacophony 102 Forgotten in the Garden 108 The History of That Ground 110 Clear to the Bottom of the Bowl 116

Digestif: O, to Take What We Love Inside 121

Acknowledgments Works Cited Index

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Taste

Aperitif And I Will Tell You What You Are

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n my family, we have a saying: “Taste this and tell me if I like it.” True, it’s a silly expression, one that denies the intimate, personal nature of taste. You and I may take a forkful from the same slice of birthday cake, but my experience of the icing dissolving on my tongue will be entirely my own. We may concur that the dessert is delicious. But agreement ends with our consensus to use the same adjective. Yum, we both exclaim. Beyond that, we cannot really know what makes the taste so delightful to the other. I might decide it’s the crunch of the rainbowed sprinkles. You might determine it’s the crumbling lightness of the cake’s buttery interior. We would both be right. No one else can tell us what we like. We must learn our tastes for ourselves. And yet, I once broke up with a man because he preferred vanilla ice cream to chocolate. Unforgivable, I thought. We were sitting at a small metal table, each of us leaning away from the other, so that our spines pressed against

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the heart-shaped backs of our chairs. If I could, I would have eaten a whole gallon of rocky road, right there in that ice cream parlor. I would have said, “I have tasted this and I am telling you, you like it.” That’s how certain I was of the unanimous appeal of chocolate. Of course, I made some pretense for breaking things off. I folded my paper napkin and, with some finality, placed it next to the glass bowl scraped clean of ice cream. I even said, “It’s not you. It’s me.” But it was him. If his taste in dessert could be so wrong, then what other failures in his judgment might I soon discover? The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would have said I doubted the man’s discernment, that I secretly believed this minor disagreement revealed deeper incompatibilities, that we were divided by social class, culture, education— distinctions that could not be overcome. We clearly loved different things. I couldn’t commit to someone who favored what my tastebuds told me was pale and bland. In his book Food Philosophy: An Introduction, scholar David M. Kaplan points to the challenge of understanding our sense of taste. The way we engage with food— as I learned from my ex-boyfriend—is wildly subjective. At the same time, as Kaplan says, “we can often agree about taste properties in food (whether something is sweet, salty, or spicy), which seems to suggest taste is objective, or at least found in objects, not only in our minds.” In fact, the tastes our minds perceive begin in our bodies. And our bodies can only understand the tastes they take in with the assistance of our interpretative, meaning-making minds. Of the five senses, taste is the one that requires of us the most active participation. Throughout the day, smells enter

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our noses without our permission. We often see and hear what we would prefer to avoid. We are constantly touched without noticing the contact: the air against our skin, the floor against the soles of our feet, the steering wheel against our palms. Once we move beyond infancy, we begin to make decisions about the foods we are offered. Our parents no longer place spoonsful of mush or little Os of dry cereal in our open mouths. Instead, we choose whether to taste something or not. With each new taste, we discover a little more about what we love or loathe, where our families come from, what they believe. We learn about recent memory and ancestral trauma. We learn about national identity. As the Frenchman Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin writes in The Physiology of Taste, his gastronomic tour de force of 1825, “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.” Tastes enter our bodies. We digest them. We are what we eat, because the things we consume become part of our cells, the movement of our thoughts, even what we perceive as the beautiful. But to slice through the mysteries of taste—how it works on or in us—it’s not enough to address our experience of the sense in lyric terms: the dry tannins of a red grape, the unexpected salt in a piece of licorice shaped like an ancient coin, the foggy intersection of fruit and acid in a glass of apple cider vinegar. We must also speak about the science of taste. We must talk about biology, ecology, and biochemistry. When studied under a microscope, the surface of the tongue looks geological, a craggy landscape we might wander in our dreams. Even standing in front of the mirror

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and sticking out our tongues, we can see thousands of tiny bumps there known as papillae, which are often described as nipple-like. Papillae come in different sizes and shapes, resembling mushrooms, domes, folds, or cones. In The Flavor Equation: The Science of Great Cooking Explained in More Than 100 Essential Recipes, food writer and scientist Nik Sharma writes that every “papilla contains a collection of taste buds which in turn contain the taste pore, through which taste cells and nerves sense the different tastes in our foods.” As our teeth tear and crush bites of food, our saliva begins the process of dissolving what we eat. Sharma explains that “taste molecules, or tastants, then travel through the pores of the taste buds, where they meet the taste receptors on the microvilli.” Different receptors are designed to sense and respond to each of the five known tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. Almost instantaneously, “the taste molecule binds with the receptor,” a signal sprinting toward the brain, so that we can identify which tastes we have consumed, the rapid, breathless delivery of the message almost inseparable from the act of eating itself. Amazing that a process this complex—I read Sharma’s explanation dozens of times before I understood it— should happen so quickly, faster than the time between bite and swallow. Sharma urges us to forget the lessons of high school biology: Taste buds containing taste receptor cells not only line the tongue surface but also coat the soft palate, the throat, and, to a lesser extent, the epiglottis and esophagus. Taste receptors are also present in the gut and lungs, where they

APERITIF act as sensors that can regulate our appetites and help protect us from harmful substances.

Contrary to what most of us were once taught, we don’t taste the salty only on the tips of our tongues. The sour is not merely located along the edges. The map of the tongue is more complicated than we might have previously imagined; to taste is to use our entire selves in the ingestion and digestion of food. Diane Ackerman explains in her iconic A Natural History of the Senses that “we normally chew about a hundred times a minute. But if we let something linger in our mouth, feel its texture, smell its bouquet, roll it around on the tongue, then chew it slowly so that we can hear its echoes, what we’re really doing is savoring it, using several senses in a gustatory free-for-all.” It’s difficult to partition off one sense from the others. The body is not an old house, one room holding our sense of taste, smell located in a closet down the hall, sound upstairs, sight stored in the attic, and touch in the basement. If we contain any kind of architecture, then we are open floor plans where the senses intermingle, communicating with one another across the space. For many, tasting may begin with sight. The eyes take in a beautiful arrangement of fruit fanned out across a plate, and already the mind can imagine that visual pleasures will lead to scrumptious flavors. The adjective mouthwatering arises from the fact that people salivate when beholding food that looks delicious. Taste involves, too, the senses of smell and touch, and often that of hearing, as when teeth crunch into an apple or a bright, hard carrot and the sound of chomping resonates loudly against the jaw.

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“To taste fully is to live fully,” asserts Kate Christensen in her memoir, Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites. “And to live fully is be awake and responsive to complexities and truths— good and terrible, overwhelming and minuscule. To eat passionately is to allow the world in; there can be no hiding or sublimation when you’re chewing a mouthful of food so good it makes you swoon.” Here Christensen is speaking about the wide menu of emotions that we bring to the act of tasting. It’s a reminder that taste is a sentimental experience as well as a physical and intellectual one, working as much on our feelings as on our bodies and minds. And according to applied ecologist Rob Dunn and medical anthropologist Monica Sanchez, the entire course of human evolution has been shaped by our pursuit of the delectable. In Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human, they argue that our development as human beings “is a story of flavor and deliciousness, and the story of flavor and deliciousness is a story of physics, chemistry, neuroscience, psychology, farming, art, ecology, and evolution.” In the process of seeking out pleasurable tastes, human beings created new tools, new means of preparing and preserving foods, and even new cultural practices. “We discern and choose through flavors,” they explain, “but we also search, research, and learn by tasting, and are uniquely suited to doing so together with others of our species, whether around a fire or at a table. We sit together and we make sense of the world one bite at a time.” What’s most important about the thesis of Delicious is the way in which Dunn and Sanchez connect the human

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impulse to survive with the development of our preference for certain tastes. They explain that taste receptors for the sweet, salty, and umami “evolved to point animals, through deliciousness, to what otherwise might be missing from their diet.” Highly caloric, nutrient-dense foods became enticing to us. Conversely, taste receptors for the sour and bitter “also serve the opposite purpose; they can point animals away from danger. They do so through feelings of displeasure.” Our ancestors sampled something that made them grimace with revulsion— a strange berry in the forest, a dark crust of fungus—and they spat the offensive morsel onto the ground, their taste receptors having just sent life-saving messages to the brain. Pleasure is a reward, and displeasure a penalty, each response linked, respectively, to the benefits or hazards of specific foods. In their book Umami: Unlocking the Secrets of the Fifth Taste, biophysicist Ole  G. Mouritsen and chef Klavs Styrbæck address the important nutritional information that taste provides. Sweetness, for example, tells the body that it is about to receive foods high in carbohydrates, which supply us with calories and energy. Sour flavors may warn us that foods are not yet ripe enough to eat or that others are fermented in ways that will be valuable to our gut health. Saltiness signals that a food contains essential “minerals and salt,” which our bodies require to function properly. Bitter foods convey one of the most essential messages of all; they tell the body, beware, indicating that a food may be risky to ingest. Mouritsen and Styrbæck write that our ability to detect the bitter “must be unambiguous and wide-ranging,” as such perceptions provide vital indications that a food “might be poisonous.” Finally, flavors

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that are umami tell the body that a food is full of “amino acids and proteins.” Of the five known tastes, the most intriguing one is also the most recently discovered. Umami, which is derived from the Japanese word umai, meaning delicious, is the taste defined by our ability to recognize the presence of salts known as glutamates in foods. Umami was first identified as a taste in 1908 by chemist Kikunae Ikeda, who studied the molecular structure of the ingredients used to make dashi, the rich, flavorful broth that is so central to Japanese cuisine. By analyzing kombu, “a species of kelp” that is to dashi as the bay leaf is to chicken stock, Ikeda was able to isolate a “salt of an organic acid, glutamic acid,” which is one of “twenty amino acids that living organisms use to build proteins.” The salt Ikeda identified was MSG or monosodium glutamate. All glutamates elicit the taste of umami in foods, “but MSG is especially effective because it interacts with another important salt in our diet—table salt.” Mouritsen and Styrbæck explain that Ikeda immediately recognized the “technological and commercial potentials” of glutamates as flavor enhancers that could be massproduced and that could be “combined with other ingredients” to increase the nutritional value of food products. But Ikeda’s discoveries not only led to the development of the “world’s largest multinational industrial enterprises,” his introduction of the word umami into our global vocabulary has also changed how many of us speak about and understand the very foods we eat. However, even as umami has entered many languages as a necessary term, Mouritsen and Styrbæck note that “there is no single word in Western languages for this particular

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taste, nor for a sensation of taste, that is equivalent to how a Japanese person experiences umami.” In Japanese cooking, the taste of umami remains linked to the satisfying qualities of dashi. Conversely, they observe: While there is a great deal of food in the West that is characterized by umami, it is often found in combination with other tastes, for example, in complex mixtures of meat and vegetables, which may also contain considerable quantities of oils and fats. . . . Consequently, if they think about it at all, Westerners tend to view umami as merely a new word for an old, familiar set of taste impressions.

It seems that, outside of Japanese cuisine, there is still much to be learned about umami, not only when it comes to how ingredients rich in glutamic acids might add nuance and depth to our meals but also on its own complex terms, as a taste that is savory, meaty, and strangely filling in the mouth. Studying umami can broaden our perception of what and how we taste. Recently, I was preparing a pot of stew, which called for dried porcini powder. Umami, I thought, as I spooned brown dust into the bubbling broth. And later, when I ate dinner, my tongue searched for the glutamates. Could I locate the flavor of mushrooms among the cubes of beef, the carrots sliced at acute angles, the liquid thickened with flour? Did the powdered porcini add some extra satisfaction the dish might otherwise have lacked? I was certain it did. “The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a star,” Brillat-Savarin

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proclaims in The Physiology of Taste, many decades before Ikeda coins the term umami. Taste can offer us numerous insights about ourselves, we who are guided both by sensation and sentiment. In Aimee Bender’s novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, the protagonist develops the uncomfortable gift of being able to detect the emotions of the person who has prepared the dish: “I could absolutely taste the chocolate, but in drifts and traces, in an unfurling, or an opening, it seemed that my mouth was also filling with the taste of smallness, the sensation of shrinking, of upset, tasting a distance I somehow knew was connected to my mother.” In the freshly baked lemon cake, Rose Edelstein can taste her mother’s terrible loneliness. But consider what Dunn and Sanchez say about the long human history of communal meals: “For many thousands of years, fireside gatherings were where our ancestors shared stories. It was around fires, with food in hand, that our ancestors communicated their knowledge and understanding. It was in such gatherings that truth could be sorted from falsehoods.” Given that the sharing of food has long served as an occasion for honest dialogue, the conceit of Bender’s novel doesn’t seem that fantastical. Eating together has always been an opportunity for intimacy. The poet Joy Harjo contends that all of life happens “at a kitchen table,” babies teething and children growing up and even the elderly preparing for death. The table is the center of all our small pains and joys, Harjo explains in “Perhaps the World Ends Here.” According to the poem, the kitchen table is a place of equality, no one seated higher, no one’s narrative more significant, each person waiting to be made—for a brief time—full and complete. “Perhaps

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the world will end at the kitchen table,” the poem concludes, “while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.” I have known every emotion at the table. I have worried about my sick dog while sitting before a bowl of soup made cold by my worrying. I have wept into my gloppy oatmeal as news of an election played on the television in the living room. And I have welcomed Shabbat joyfully by tearing into a braided loaf of bread. In her introduction to An Alphabet for Gourmets, famed food writer M. F. K. Fisher acknowledges that the choices she makes in her book might be seen by some as controversial. “Why did I end the alphabet with a discussion of the hors d’oeuvres called zakuski,” she asks, “surely more appropriate at the beginning of any feast, literary of otherwise, and ignore the fine fancies to be evoked by the word zabaglione, with all its connotations of sweet satisfaction and high flavor?” Fisher argues that, in between the lines of her alphabet, a reader “may write his own gastronomical beliefs, call forth his own remembered feastings.” I could offer a similar defense of this book: that it is a product of my own idiosyncratic way of tasting the world, that it reflects my peripatetic upbringing as the daughter of two American Foreign Service officers, that it reveals my training as a poet, my love of the visual arts, my anxieties about the relationship between trauma and the beautiful. My favorite kind of meal is one that offers me many small plates of food. Antipasti. Banchan. Meze. Tapas. This book is for the diner who prefers a repast filled with dozens of cacophonous flavors. You have arrived hungry for a nibble of food studies or literature, for philosophy, religion, or

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art history, perhaps a little music. Very well then. Let me offer you a sampling of tastes from across disciplines. If we sit together at this table, we can pass the plates between us, serving ourselves a spoonful from each dish, tearing into hunks of bread, slicing the meats, the cheeses. We can mix the savory with the sweet, the salty with the sour. Here, I say to you, try a bite of this. And maybe you’ll like this, I say. Yes, yes, go on, taste this one too—

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THE EYES OF THE TWO WERE OPENED Where to start? Perhaps with late afternoon, the garden now softened by shadow and all the beasts curling in the grass, sleepy from the heat. Or begin with the slithering voice that says, just taste it, taste it. Or start with all the poems and essays about the fruit, the paintings of the man and woman, the ancient weavings, the wood carvings, the mosaics formed of tiny, handcut tiles. Start with the stained-glass window, his body and hers positioned in such a way we cannot see their genitals, the parts they have discovered are naked. Start with the light passing through panes of blue and red, the black lines of leading that cut the serpent into bright slivers of yellow. The problem with the fruit of knowledge of good and evil is that there has been too much said about it. Although the narrative as it’s written is more an outline for the story

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to come than a complete telling in itself, there are already so many others who have filled in the details of the scene, who have described the height of the tree and the leaves overhead. And yet perhaps there is still a portion of this tale we can bite into and find something new. In The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary, scholar Robert Alter renders the crucial moment vivid with sensory detail:

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And the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and that it was lust to the eyes and the tree was lovely to look at, and she took of its fruit and ate, and also gave to her man, and he ate. And the eyes of the two were opened, and they knew they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves and made themselves loincloths.

The text only speaks of vision—“the woman saw,” “it was lust to the eyes,” “the tree was lovely to look at.” But it’s easy to reason from this passage that what Adam and Eve taste in the fruit alters all their senses forever. Sight functions here as synecdoche, the one sense standing in for all five. They see that they are naked. They also feel the absence of protection when the breeze that rubs against their skin, how it touches without consent the now private pieces of their bodies. They can hear the snake sliding on a nearby branch, slick scales against bark. Its tongue flicks in and out, licking the air in a low hissss. They smell their own nervous sweat. And in their mouths sits the pulp of fruit. It has a taste—who knew that food could taste like this— sugary but with the bitterness of a few hard seeds.

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When they hear God walking through the garden, they hide, because his footsteps now fall—now feel—like a threat. He sounds like a father coming to the door of a bedroom to punish a naughty child. They never noticed before how loudly God moves, the divine weight of his pacing across the soil, the thud of his heels. Earlier, God cautioned: “From every fruit of the garden may you surely eat. But from the tree of knowledge, good and evil, you shall not eat, for on the day you eat from it, you are doomed to die.” The fruit is not immediate poison. Instead, when they ingest knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve perceive themselves differently; while they may have always been mortal, they now understand there will be things called wrinkles, the cracking of joints, spines increasingly bent. They see out to the edges of themselves. They see that Eden is walled. Beyond it, must be another place, a place not-garden, a place unparadised. In The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: The Story That Created Us, scholar Stephen Greenblatt tries to understand why this particular narrative has such power. “You hear it at five or six years old,” he writes, “and you never forget it. . . . Something in the structure of this narrative sticks; it is almost literally unforgettable.” We all must eat. Most of us possess the ability to taste and can experience new flavors. The first time we taste anything unfamiliar, we encounter fresh knowledge. I was a toddler the day my father placed a morsel of dark chocolate on my tongue. “Come here, Jehanne,” he called to me. In my parents’ telling of the story, I opened my mouth then began to run again around the kitchen table. All at once, I stopped as if struck by the flavor, chocolate and its sharp complexities,

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sweet and bitter, sour and salt, the way it disappears in the mouth by melting. I ran back to my father. “More!” I can’t recall how old I was when I heard the story of Adam and Eve. As a child I often imagined that initial bite, the juice in my mouth, my fingers sticky with sugar. But now I wonder if the fruit, taken into the body, ceases to exist. Once they have both eaten, what’s left begins to wither in their hands, like a cut peach forgotten on the counter overnight. The juice is inside them now, its taste gone the way all tastes do, disappearing once we have consumed a food. We can remember what we’ve seen and vividly resee it in our thoughts. But taste refuses to be reconstructed in this manner; the only thing that reinvigorates a recollected taste is to taste it again. And that, of course, does not happen with the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. God delivers instead the first of many curses, driving Adam and Eve from the garden “to till the soil” and delegating “the cherubim and the flame of the whirling sword” to block a return to Eden. The memory of the fruit begins to disappear, until the man and woman can only tell their children, Once we ate something that changed us entirely, so that we were like day turned into night. Greenblatt argues that the story of Adam and Eve “addresses who we are, where we came from, why we love and why we suffer,” the tale seeming to suggest that “it could all have been otherwise.” I’m not sure about the otherwise of the narrative. Reading the story again, I can’t help feeling that the fall was inevitable, the forbidden placed at the garden’s center, not to be eaten from but impossible to avoid. Perhaps, this is why the two do not repent. And God, having given his human creations free will, should not

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have been surprised by the outcome of his experiment. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, God says of Adam: “I made him just and right, / Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.” God also gave the power to name things. As soon as Adam began labeling the world around him, learning the landscape through language, was it not inevitable he would be hungry for more? This afternoon I cut into an apple. It is pink on the outside, a shade that resembles embarrassed skin. It seems to blush, as if sensing its own nakedness. This could have been the fruit, I think. And I lift a slice, its interior pale and glistening, to my lips. 17

THE ESSENCE OF ONESELF This time I’ll begin with a memory. Today I bite into a piece of toast spread with strawberry jam and am thrown nearly forty years back to when I was six years old, flushed with a fever. It is Poland. 1981. My mother’s cool palm rests against my forehead. She pinches her mouth shut in a shape I recognize as worry. Now she picks up the thermometer and raises it to the light to study again the slender line of mercury in the glass stem. What she sees there confirms what she already knows: my temperature is too high. She strokes my hair, pushing a damp curl behind my ear. “Time for some medicine,” she says. But I’m not good at taking big round pills. I sit beside her in the kitchen, watching as she crushes a white tablet— Acetaminophen— on a dinner plate. Then she mixes the powder with a lump of strawberry jam. And that is how I

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swallow it, the bitter dust swirled in a spoonful of pink, the jam forever tasting of childhood sickness and of my mother’s worry, her skin against my skin. Most of us have traveled in this way, launched into the past by the sparking of our senses. We hear an old love song on the radio and are flung into memory, the summer long ago when we listened to that same chorus over and over, wondering when we too would feel desire’s sweating, pulsing heat. Or we smell a whiff of aftershave while walking on some city street, green and heavy in the air. It’s the fragrance of our first kiss, and we can feel the lips, uncertain hands, the fumbling of inexperience. Marcel Proust’s novel in seven parts, most accurately translated as In Search of Lost Time, made famous the ability of the senses to transport us. In the opening section of the first book, Swann’s Way, a narrator named Marcel— closely resembling Proust himself— attempts to remember his childhood village Combray. He recalls the place in a blurred, gauzy way, as if memory were a “luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background.” Marcel concludes that the Combray of his youth is essentially dead, the intellect incapable of summoning the past. Only when we encounter a “material object,” something that forcefully activates the senses, can the long-ago be returned to us. But one day, while he’s visiting his mother, Marcel tastes a spoonful of tea in which he has soaked a piece of a madeleine, a small cake molded to look like a scallop shell. He explains: “No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that

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was happening to me.” Marcel is filled with joy, suffused with the “essence” of himself. “It was me,” he asserts. He takes a second sip, feeling the same sensation, takes a third, feels the startling pleasure beginning to dissipate. Now he analyzes what has just occurred, going back in his imagination to that first gulp of tea. It takes concentration. He must shut out the sounds around him. Then he realizes there’s an image, a visual memory that is linked to that distinctive flavor of cake and tea, which is struggling to reach his “conscious mind.” Well onto the next page, Marcel can’t identify the memory that flickers at the edge of his thoughts. And then, suddenly, he recognizes it: the madeleine blended with tea— that sudden softening of the cake, its texture transformed by the warm immersion in liquid—takes him to his Aunt Léonie, who used to give him these very cakes dipped in her tisane, when he was a young boy in Combray. The sight of the madeleine triggered no memories. But, as Marcel explains, when from a long- distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear, unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

The flavor of the madeleine intermingled with aroma of the lime blossom tea is like a glittering chunk of Baltic

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amber that holds, perfectly preserved and intact, an insect from another time. Taste and smell work together, a pairing that has come to be known as the oral sense. We lift the piece of amber to the light and can see, held inside the golden drop, those delicate wings, those small, bent legs, the body held as if eternally in flight. As soon as Marcel recognizes the link between taste, scent, and the past, it’s as if he opens a door inside himself:

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Immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set . . . and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers . . . and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

The past, Marcel recognizes, isn’t lost. It’s held within us, as if each of us were a box comprised of hidden compartments, drawers, and cubbyholes, and all we need to do is search the small sections, unhook the miniature latches, lift the tiny lids, and look inside. There we can retrieve our own memories, three-dimensional and unchanged. Swann’s Way was first published in 1913, and the story of the madeleine has since become an essential part of how we talk about the relationship between taste, smell, and memory. Almost four decades later, in his novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison describes how the aroma of baked

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yams in Harlem returns the narrator to his childhood in the South: “I stopped as though struck by a shot, deeply inhaling, remembering, my mind surging back, back.” He observes how time seems “endlessly expanded, stretched thin as the spiraling smoke beyond all recall.” Proust’s influence stretches so far that even the children’s animated film Ratatouille featured a Proustian moment in one of its climactic scenes. A vindictive food critic tastes a dish of ratatouille, prepared by the movie’s protagonist, a rat named Remy who dreams of being a chef. As the critic takes his first bite, the camera zooms in toward his dilated pupils and then slides swiftly away from him. The Parisian restaurant disappears and, all at once, we find ourselves in an intense recollection. The food critic is a boy. He weeps at the doorway to his house, a wrecked bicycle lying on the ground behind him. His mother places a bowl of warm ratatouille on the kitchen table. The steam rises from the stewed vegetables in faint tendrils. As the child spoons some eggplant and zucchini into his mouth, the camera again speeds toward his eyes, cutting back to the present day. For a second, the critic sits stunned and then begins to eat. He is no longer someone who assesses food for a living, but a man enjoying—without critical detachment— a delicious meal. The Proustian moment has transformed him. There are foods we discover when we’re children, which we continue to eat for the rest of our lives. For instance, I first tasted marzipan when I was seven. We were visiting Munich in the spring, and I called the place “candy city,” every bakery window filled with towers of pastry, golden

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breads drizzled with icing, and rows of almond paste cast in the shape of fruits and vegetables, pink piglets, spotted ladybugs. When I took that initial bite of marzipan—a perfectly formed peach—I immediately fell in love with the balance of almonds and sugar, the paste gritty against my teeth. If this had been a single encounter with marzipan, if I had tasted the candy again only decades later, I might have experienced an involuntary flash of memory like the one Proust describes. But marzipan became a favorite treat. I’ve probably eaten it hundreds of times, and the flavor is no longer linked solely to Munich on a certain afternoon in April. Perhaps taste is an archeologist, its work to uncover the cities buried whole inside us. Or taste is a spiritual medium; without it, we cannot access the ghosts of memory. Whatever the metaphor, each of us has a madeleine. Each of us has a spoonful of strawberry jam, a flavor we seldom encounter, but when we do . . . well, it flings us across years and miles. Tasting the cake mixed with tea, Marcel finds only one cluster of associations: his childhood, his Aunt Léonie, and Combray. The Proustian experience is defined by its uniqueness; an unusual flavor is attached to the particularity of a certain moment (often from that vivid era of childhood, when the things we taste begin to define who we are and who we will become), a certain person, and a certain setting. When we encounter what Proust calls “material objects,” our senses are activated by their rarity, and we are thrust into the luminous, delectable rooms of the past.

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SUCH HINTS OF HONEY Each night before bed, I eat a slippery spoonful of raw honey. Derived from the nectar of mānuka trees in New Zealand, it’s thought to have medicinal purposes. Some people use it to treat skin infections and open wounds. I take it because it’s thick and dark, with a slight shadow of the bitter; I prefer sweet things that resist giving in entirely to syrupy, cloying sweetness. That great philosopher of the Ursidae family, Winniethe-Pooh, Bear of Very Little Brain, tells Christopher Robin what he likes “best in the world” is the “moment just before” one begins to eat from a pot of honey. Perhaps what Pooh loves is the imagining—his thoughts buzzing like a bee in search of a cluster of yellow flowers—that precedes the first taste. Even for a bear, I suspect, honey can be too sweet at times, while the anticipation of honey contains more complexity: the pine tree’s needling bitterness, the green of clover, the wispy purples of heather. In her lecture “Madness, Rack, and Honey,” the poet Mary Ruefle writes about what she calls “the honey of poetry,” explaining that what makes the artform miraculous is its transformative effects: “once there was a blank page— scary!—now there is something in its place that is attracting flies.” She quotes a brief Persian verse: “I shall not finish my poem. / What I have written is so sweet / the flies are beginning to torment me.” According to Ruefle, sweetness defines the process of writing poems. The making of metaphor is an event the poet experiences; it leads to the discovery “that everything in the world is connected.”

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To make a metaphor, after all, is to bring together, surprisingly, radiantly, two unlike things. But while poetry offers the writer a taste of honey, it causes problems too. Ruefle reminds us that “honey has its complications.” It summons flies with its yellow-orange sugar. This is the rack of poetry, she explains. It is a torture device, causing the poet to put a strain on language, and the words, in return, stretching the poet “beyond normal extent.” The second problem of poetry is the madness of how it is stored inside us. Ruefle recounts a story of a soldier, “wounded, dazed” at Hiroshima. Standing among the devastations of the city, he comes across a group of women who cry out in horror at his injuries. When he sees the women’s reactions to his pain, the soldier is reminded of a poem by Li Po he read thirty years before. “For the first time,” he realizes that the text “was not just a piece of skillful description, but a work of intense emotion.” Ruefle is amazed by this anecdote: “There’s the madness of honey—a poem by Li Po! after thirty years!—and there’s the madness of rack that was Hiroshima. That they are capable of exchanging energy is what I mean by madness.” A poem’s sweetness leads to its own devouring. As readers, we are flies consuming language the way we might eat servings of honey straight from the jar. It’s easy to swallow all that liquidized sugar. It goes down smoothly. “The madness of poetry is that it creates sweetness,” writes Ruefle, “so that the flies might come and eat it till it is gone.” In her memoir, A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings: A Year of Keeping Bees, Helen Jukes recounts the first time she announced to other people that she might “get a

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beehive.” The response from a colleague was a single word. “Madness.” Jukes is less interested, however, in honey, than she is in learning whether it’s possible for us to keep a thing as wild as a bee. Can these whirring, waggling creatures really be kept? Or do they simply choose to use the human-made homes they’re offered because the wooden frames provide some protection from the rain and wind? Jukes spends a year looking after a hive positioned at the edge of her small garden in Oxford, worrying daily about the colony. She wonders whether one could come to know each bee intimately, to see each one as an individual, to know each distinct voice. A bee lands on her hand, and she studies its mandibles. “Everything about her is somewhere between reaching and receiving,” Jukes observes; the bee “probes the world, tastes and touches it, as she bites and chews it.” In Jukes’s understanding, the bee is a creature incapable of leaving the landscape untransformed, pollen sticking to the insect’s body like a nubby, multicolored cloth, nectar sloshing in the stomach, waiting to be changed into honey. The honey itself, Jukes writes, “doesn’t come from heaven as Aristotle suggested but from nectar, which is contained within the glands of plants— a thin and easily spoiled liquid that is converted by the worker bees into a stable, highly concentrated and high- energy food source.” Worker bees use the proboscis, a tongue shaped like a straw, to slurp the nectar from flowers. Then they return to the hive, where they pass the sweet liquid on to bees too young to wander in the larger world. The nectar is processed in their mouths and stomachs, enzymes altering its flavor and composition. Next the bees deposit it in small

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hexagonal compartments. The colony fans it with their thousands of wings until the temperature inside rises and the nectar begins to evaporate. Nectar is converted to honey once its water content reduces to approximately 20 percent. Finally, the bees seal the six-sided containers with a lid of wax, readying the honey for storage. Conversion, it seems to me, is a synonym for metaphor. Nectar starts as a clear fluid and is transformed by its contact with bees into something dense and golden, viscous, occasionally crystalized and creamy. This transfiguration helps to explain why honey is so suited to the figurative. Honey is everywhere in the Song of Songs, the beloved’s mouth filled with it, sweet as it. In The Iliad, Achilles speaks of anger as sweeter than dripping honey. Sappho mourns both the absence of honey and the honeybee from her life. And then there is the honey of Emily Dickinson’s stitched packets of poems, what she called fascicles, a word that comes from biology, meaning bundle of nerves or muscle fibers, and from botany too, meaning the vascular tissue in certain kinds of plants. Dickinson’s poems practically hum with bees, the bee compared to fame, the bee an interlocutor, a thing with pedigree, a creature forever circling the clover. In a letter from 1884 that she sent to her friend Elizabeth Holland, Dickinson enclosed these four quick lines: “Within that little Hive / Such Hints of Honey lay / As made Reality a Dream / And Dreams, Reality—.” Here, the honey in the comb leads the mind toward musing. And why not? The interior of a hive must be a place of discombobulating sweetness, all that sound and heat, the shivering of wings, the

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vivid smell of pollen and the queen’s pheromones, the movements of the colony both real and dreamlike. The poem ends before we’ve barely started reciting the words. It demands we reread it, that we try to imagine honey as a medium through which thought might flow, dreams and reality moving in the closed circuit of the bees’ community. I’m reminded again of Ruefle’s story of the soldier at Hiroshima. That a poem and a site of atrocity can be linked, “that they are capable of exchanging energy”—this is what Ruefle calls the relationship between madness, rack, and honey. A friend once gave me a photograph of dozens of jars of honey for sale at a farmer’s market. She took the picture in the Polish town of Oświęcim, a place that most of the world knows as Auschwitz. “Miód Naturalny,” reads the label on each jar. Natural honey. The contents glow like Baltic amber. The whole picture shimmers as if the honey has thickened the sunlight to glittering liquid. The composition is entirely beautiful. I was standing beside my friend when she pointed her camera toward the display of local honey. “That will be a spectacular picture,” I said. And it was. As she snapped the shot, I was already thinking about the sonnet I would write. Without context, a viewer would not know that madness and rack are held within the honey. A viewer would not know that, beyond the frame of the photograph, one of the death camps was only a short walk from where we stood. Not far from us were barbed wire perimeters, but also the grasses thick with wildflowers and even the nectar waiting for the pointed, inquisitive touch of bees.

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WHO’S THAT NIBBLING ON MY HOUSE?

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As the Brothers Grimm tell it, everyone is hungry. The adults. The two children. The birds that devour the breadcrumbs. The story begins with deprivation, a wife telling her husband, “early tomorrow morning you’re to take both the children and give each of them a piece of bread. Then lead them into the middle of the forest where it’s most dense. After you build a fire for them, go away and leave them there. We can no longer feed them.” The father knows the boy and girl will be devoured by the “wild beasts,” the wolves and bears who are also starving. But eventually he agrees. Still awake, the brother and sister hear what their mother is saying. The boy creeps outside to gather white stones that shine “in front of the house like pure silver coins.” He weighs his pockets with pebbles and crawls back in bed. That night, the children barely sleep, their worry like another kind of hunger in their bellies. The next day, the parents walk with Hansel and Gretel to where the grasses are high and the brambles catch on their coats. They leave the children. “We’re going into the forest to chop wood,” the mother says. “When we’re finished we’ll come back and get you.” Hansel and Gretel wait until it’s dark, until they know that, yes, their parents have left them in the thick of wildness. Then they follow the path of white stones that Hansel dropped behind them that morning, when they first left home with their mother and father. The children return to the cottage. Dinner that night is a thin liquid that can barely be called broth, a few slices of

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potato floating on the surface. No one speaks. The only sound is the scrape of spoons, like a small complaint, against the bowls. And a few weeks later, the mother again tells the father: “Tomorrow you must take them farther into the forest so that they won’t find their way back home again.” Hansel doesn’t have time to collect stones. And the breadcrumbs he drops to mark the trail are gobbled up by birds the color of shadow. After their father abandons them again, the children are lost and walk for days in the woods, with nothing to eat but a few fallen berries. Hansel and Gretel come upon a cottage made of gingerbread, its walls dripping with icing, the windows hard panes of sugar. Wouldn’t we all, under such circumstances, eat? Snap off a piece of the roof? Break a little chunk of a shutter? And then they hear a voice calling from inside: “Nibble, nibble, I hear a louse! / Who’s that nibbling on my house?” The fairy tale is clear about the old woman who comes outside to meet them. She is, we are told, “really a wicked witch. . . . As soon as she had any children in her power, she would kill, cook, and eat them.” Here is more hunger, though the witch lives in a cookie house. Soon the siblings are locked indoors, Hansel crouching in a chicken coop and Gretel preparing heavy meals to fatten up her brother. For the end of the fairy tale, I look to memory. When I was a child, my parents used to take me every year at Christmastime to see Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel at the Grand Theater in Warsaw. Outside was the gray of Communist-era Poland. Inside the opera house, the stage twinkled with fireflies as the children walked into

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the forest. The brother and sister were sung by two grown women. I could see the rouge on their cheeks and the freckles they had painted across their faces. Nonetheless, I believed the hunger of these tall adults costumed as a little boy and girl. In the final act, when Gretel shoved the witch into the hot oven, there was a great puff of smoke, an enormous pop that made me shriek, oh! The gingerbread house split into two sharp pieces. No matter how many times we saw the opera, I always called out oh! that the horror could end so abruptly, that Hansel was not boiled after all, and Gretel not baked. I sat on the velvet seat, my mother to my right and my father to my left, and I cried out because here was a world in which children had to learn to rescue themselves from famished strangers. No one would come to save them. It was terrifying entertainment, the family starving or the children filling themselves on mouthfuls of sugar. Hunger and gluttony. And a message about sweetness: that it can be a trick, that sweet things do not always come from those who are sweet, that sweet is not in fact the same as good. The Brothers Grimm end the story with a moment of magic. When the witch dies, the cottage suddenly fills with “jewels and pearls.” The children’s pockets are now stuffed with wealth, not glittering white stones that only resemble silver coins, not stale breadcrumbs that feed only birds. They find their way home, and their father cries with relief when he sees them. And the mother? We are told nothing more than that she’s dead. But what happens after that?

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I suspect Hansel and Gretel never touched another piece of candy or a slice of cake. The smell of cardamom and cloves took them back, in a flash of fragrant horror, to the gingerbread house in the forest. In winter, they dreaded the trays of lebkuchen displayed in shopwindows, those plump cookies filled with jam. They refused even the sweetness of honey. For the rest of their lives, they ate nothing glazed with sugar.

REFINED Once I gave up sugar for a year. The first month I craved it, dreamed about the sturdy grains of turbinado, the snow dust of powdered sugar, the bright quartz of ordinary white sugar. I studied food labels and was surprised to find it everywhere. It was in my ketchup and pasta sauce, all my beverages. My body missed it, told me so with headaches and exhaustion. Later, when the withdrawal symptoms had passed, I felt nostalgia for sugar the way I might have remembered a former friend. Before our falling out, hadn’t we enjoyed one another’s company? Hadn’t we shared many moments of happiness? Throughout my long year of attempting to be sugarless, I liked to imagine that I could take in the sweet through my eyes. Consuming sugar led to tooth decay, weight gain, and a host of other documented health risks. But looking could be harmless, I decided. To satisfy my sweet tooth, I sought out Paul Cézanne’s many representations of a lidded sugar bowl: white porcelain or ceramic, the lid and handles delicately curved.

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Sometimes he places a grouping of pears or peaches beside the bowl. Sometimes the thick folds of a tablecloth nearly conceal it. Always the bowl remains covered, its contents implied. There is sugar inside the container, but Cézanne never shows the crystalline cubes to the viewer. In my sugar-deprived state, even this suggestion of sweetness was enough to make my teeth tingle with sensitivity. I knew there was a small mound of sugar beneath the lid. If only I could lift it. I looked at the paintings of Wayne Thiebaud as well. His canvases are sugar shock for the eyes. There are hundreds of tiered desserts covered in meringue, each confection placed on a pale plate, often positioned before a neutral, geometric background of white or turquoise. Essayist Adam Gopnik says that, above all, Thiebaud is “an American painter.” And although Thiebaud has depicted “vertiginous cityscapes and nudes and eye-in-the-sky landscapes and bow ties and lipsticks and pinball machines,” no matter the object positioned within the frame, the effect is always the same: “democratic abundance seen in aristocratic isolation.” Gazing at Thiebaud’s perfectly rendered clusters of pastries, the paint thick as royal icing, it was easy for me to believe all this sweetness belonged to me. But in their glass cases, elegantly arranged to show off their pipette roses or glistening ganache, the cakes also remained eternally out of my reach. Abundant indeed and isolated. I had long given up the giving up of sugar when Kara Walker’s 2014 installation A Subtlety opened to the public in a shuttered Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn. With the sugary delights of Cézanne and Theibaud, I could persuade myself that looking was a harmless act, but Walker’s

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A Subtlety was an argument for the voracity of the gaze: looking as a violent devouring. And what visitors to A Subtlety consumed was a series of representations of enslaved Black bodies. The full title of the installation was: At the behest of Creative Time Kara E. Walker has confected: A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant

Walker was influenced by Sidney Mintz’s landmark history of sugar, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. In Sweetness and Power, Mintz describes how subtleties— elaborate sugar sculptures that adorned the feast tables of medieval royalty—began as ostentatious displays of wealth but eventually became something more significant, evolving into “message-bearing objects that could be used to make a special point.” A subtlety of the Middle Ages was “a food that could be sculptured, written upon, admired, and read before it was eaten.” Walker’s A Subtlety certainly provided much for an audience to read, beginning with a thirty-five-foot sculpture of a sphinxlike Black woman who dominated the space. The piece was naked except for a kerchief tied around her hair, her breasts and labia monumental. Writer Hilton Als describes the sphinx as crouched in a manner that was

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both “regal and yet totemic of subjugation,” her size suggesting power and strength, her nakedness implying vulnerability. Her uncanny, whitened skin seemed to go on for miles, endless curves. “Sugar is brown in its ‘raw’ state,” reminds Als. Made of polystyrene foam, the sphinx was coated in refined sugar, her body bleached. There were thirteen smaller sculptures positioned around the sphinx. Based on mass-produced, ceramic figurines—little boys forced to work the cane fields, their arms burdened with baskets, bunches of fruit— some of these sculptures were resin and some were candy the color of molasses. Many of the candy children melted in the warmth of the old building, their disintegrating limbs disposed of or tossed into the sugary baskets they carried. For two months, A Subtlety was Brooklyn’s must-see attraction. Visitors were mostly white, often posing before the sphinx’s body, taking smiling pictures in front of her exposed genitals. The public’s engagement with the installation— a mixture of disrespectful and not—became an element of the art. As people circled through the space, the room was altered by the ephemerality of the audience’s behavior, their gestures, their voices like sugar dissolving in warm water. Once the installation closed, the sphinx was taken apart, only her left hand saved, the hand still making its ambiguous signal, thumb wedged between pointer and middle finger, the fig sign, which Als says can mean “good luck, or ‘fuck you,’ or fertility.” The exhibit was temporary, but its impact on my thinking was not. Once I had taken sweetness for granted. It was so ubiquitous that I only noticed sugar when I cut it from my diet. And I only thought about sugar’s provenance

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thanks to Walker’s A Subtlety. In an interview, the artist called this omnipresent food product “blood sugar,” explaining that the way we “we talk about blood diamonds today, there were pamphlets saying this sugar has blood on its hands.” In the same interview, she went on to observe that “we’re all kind of invested in its production without really realizing just what goes into it; how much chemistry goes into extracting whiteness from the sugar cane.” Extracting whiteness. It’s both a metaphor and an accurate description of what happens when sugar is refined, first crushed and boiled, then the juice turned to crystal, then spun centrifugally, filtered to remove further impurities, and at last dried and packaged for consumption. Near the start of Sweetness and Power, Sidney Mintz explains that in the space of approximately nine hundred years sugar went from being almost unknown in Europe to providing “nearly one-fifth of the calories in the English diet.” Mintz asks a pair of simple questions: “How and why did this happen? What turned an exotic, foreign, and costly substance into the daily faire of even the poorest and humblest people?” The answer, Mintz explains, is slavery. Because of sugar, he writes, “literally millions of enslaved Africans reached the New World, particularly the American south, the Caribbean and its littorals, the Guianas and Brazil.” First the Spanish, then the French and British, and later the Americans used slave labor to keep the prices of sugar low and to meet the ever increasing demand. Historian James Walvin writes that by the eighteenth century sugar could be found everywhere in Europe, not only “in the grand homes of successful slave traders and merchants” but also “in the simple pleasure of a sweet cup

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of tea or coffee in the humblest homes. The fruits of slave labour had thoroughly permeated the Western world, and had become so entangled in the social and physical fabric of Western life that it was hard even to notice it.” The consumption of sugar fed the slave trade, and the slave trade fed sugar consumption. It was only with the slow abolition of slavery and the introduction of the sugar beet as a new source of sweetness that sugar lost some of what Kara Walker called “the blood on its hands.” Looking again at those paintings by Paul Cézanne, I wonder if the sugar held inside those many iterations of the lidded bowl came from a company that profited from slavery? The later paintings from the 1890s, maybe not. But the earlier ones from the 1860s? Perhaps. Walvin observes that “slavery went unchallenged and unquestioned in very large part because it yielded such benefits and pleasures to so many people. Any pain or misery it inflicted on millions of Africans were largely invisible to Europeans, because they lurked somewhere over the horizon, out of sight, and out of mind.” For hundreds of years, slavery was to many Europeans and Americans like something hidden beneath the delicate lid of a porcelain sugar bowl. If I look again at the “democratic abundance” and “aristocratic isolation” of Thiebaud’s cakes, I also find cruelty in these canvases. In the exquisite textures of paint made to look like icing, I see copious amounts of affordable sugar. Even today in the modern sugar industry it takes many exploited hands— often including the hands of children—to extract whiteness from the cane. Despite the neutrality of the setting, the cold glass cases, the tall cake

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stands, Thiebaud’s confections are made of ingredients that have a violent history, that tell a story. To look is to devour. My eyes take in both the sugar and what has been done to produce such sweetness, the cutting and the crushing, the filtering to remove color, all for the sake of edible, glistening crystals.

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SWEETEST THINGS TURNED SOUREST During a summer in my early twenties, I had a brief obsession with strawberry sour belts, those vivid pink candies cut into long, flexible strips, their texture gummy, their surface covered in a glittering layer of tart sugar. I bought them by the pound at a small candy shop in town. The rule was this: I had to eat the whole bag in an afternoon. There was an element of punishment to the pleasure. I ate the sour belts until my taste buds burned. My tongue felt scorched for days. At the time I was living in an apartment I had once shared with a man I loved. After he moved out, I sweated alone in the unairconditioned rooms, bored and furious to be the person left behind and not the leaver. I began to scribble poems in a notebook, my handwriting tiny, black knots on the page. I listened to music that sounded like keening. And, of course, there was an open bag of candy

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beside me. It felt good to rip apart a sour belt with my hands, the sugar crystals sharp against my fingers. I liked to bite hard into a piece, the flavor of artificial strawberry simultaneously caustic and neon sweet. When I research the ingredients that go into making these kinds of candies, I learn they’re mostly comprised of sugar, corn syrup, and something called invert sugar syrup. They also contain many starches, including modified corn starch, wheat starch, and more corn starch. Their color, I’m unhappy to learn, comes from cochineal extract, a bright red food dye made from the bodies of dried, crushed insects. The colorant is also known as carmine and, innocuously enough, as natural red 4. As for the ingredient that gives the candy belts their sourness, that comes from a dry coating of fruit-derived acids, such as citric or malic acid. I was miserable that summer and didn’t care I was eating something that could scald my tongue. In fact, I developed a theory about myself: I could only appreciate the sweet if it caused me a little hurt. Without their sour coating, the strawberry belts would be cloying, too pink and ecstatic a taste, I was sure. By late June, I had decided my suffering made me a poet. I had already started writing in a second notebook, as I worked my way through Shakespeare’s sonnets. Some form of sourness appears five times over the sequence of 154 poems: sourly, sour, sourly, sour, and sourest. And in three of these poems, Shakespeare links the sour to the sweet. In sonnet 35, for instance, a speaker in conflict with himself addresses the young, unfaithful man— often known as the Fair Youth—who has hurt him. In the opening eight

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lines of the poem, he forgives his beloved, acknowledging that beautiful things can also have flaws. “Roses have thorns,” he argues, “and silver fountains mud.” Even the speaker, in making these kinds of poetic analogies, should be judged, his metaphors a small “trespass.” In the poem’s closing six lines, he turns to the language of the courtroom to assess his own failings. He is “an accessary” to his lover’s misdeeds. He resents the young man for his betrayals and hates himself for excusing these infidelities. He concludes his case by calling the young man a “sweet thief” who “sourly robs” the speaker. Robs him of what? The text doesn’t say. Peace of mind perhaps. An unburdened conscience. A night of easy sleep. Whatever the theft, the speaker recognizes that his pain lies in the tension between sweet and sour, between the beloved’s beauty and his lacerating acts. Sonnet 39 examines the way lovers may be both united and divided, may exist as a single being while remaining two distinct individuals. The speaker questions how he can praise the young man without sounding conceited. In extolling the Fair Youth, does he not compliment himself: “And what is’t but mine own when I praise thee?” The poem keeps turning back on itself, the speaker reasoning that it would be best to maintain some distance from his beloved, then immediately regretting the expanse between them. And as soon as he wishes his lover close again, he acknowledges the value of staying apart. “O absence,” the speaker exclaims, “what a torment wouldst thou prove, / Were it not thy sour leisure gave sweet leave, / To entertain the time with thoughts of love.” Here the sour and the sweet are two distinct tastes, but they are joined as well,

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brought together in the same way that farewells and reunions respectively make the lovers two and then one. Sonnet 94, the thorniest of the three sour-and-sweet sonnets, considers what it means to have power and to wield that force ethically. Scholar Stephen Booth characterizes 94 as “a stylistic mirror of the speaker’s indecision,” so faltering and uncertain that it has frequently “impinged on the consciousness of readers” and therefore become “the most frequently interpreted” of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In the poem, the speaker contends that the best rulers are stoics who have power but choose not to use it, who are “unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow.” These regal men are “the lords and owners of their faces,” serene as figures carved from blocks of marble, while people of lesser character are merely “stewards of their excellence.” Of course, despite its examination of the aristocracy, the sonnet remains a love poem. Shakespeare uses the metaphor of nobility and commoners to depict a romantic relationship in which one person has dominion over the other, love a hierarchal thing, imbalanced by its very nature and design. If the Fair Youth is self-possessed, a distant lord managing the estate of his heart, then the speaker is of a lower class, coarse and emotional. After its opening octet, the sonnet takes a sharp turn toward a new metaphor, looking instead to the garden for its closing argument. The powerful man is now refigured as a flower. He is “sweet” as long as he maintains selfcontrol, discipline, all the desired traits of a Shakespearean hero. But if he meets “with base infection,” perhaps giving himself over to volatility or jealous passion, then even the most ordinary weed will smell better than this

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flower rotted at its roots. The poem ends with a pair of lines that ring their condemnation: “For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; / Lilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds.” Literary critic Helen Vendler explains that these closing lines are “a turn toward the proverbial” and reveal “the speaker’s despair at solving by himself, in personally formulated language, the conundrum presented by the sonnet.” Unable to fully explain what he feels about the Fair Youth, the speaker must resort to a proverb, echoing familiar language because his own creativity has failed him. Of all three poems, sonnet 94 pairs the sweet with the sour to create the sharpest contrast, the flower’s degradation made worse by the sweetness of the fragrance it once held in its petals. In that long summer of my loneliness and fury, everything seemed sour to me. Beyond the pages of my notebook, I was not self-restrained. If I had been able to claim any power “to hurt,” I certainly would have done it. The man I loved had left, and I was the “basest weed”; the roots of my anger felt as if they stretched far below me into the dirt. Every day I wrote a Shakespearean sonnet of my own, trying to get right the form’s meter, the intertwining rhyme scheme: abab cdcd efef gg. The sonnet, I concluded, was fourteen lines of argument, an essay in miniature. A good sonnet had a thesis statement, which the poet then supported with textual evidence. The hardest part of the Shakespearean sonnet was the closing couplet, the final rhyme so difficult because it had to chime like a tiny piece of music while locking only part of the argument shut, leaving some room for ambivalence and inconclusiveness. It had to make both sound and (almost) sense.

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That summer nothing much made sense. Over and over, I wrote the name of the man I loved in my notebook. I wrote his name in the margins of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I was forever opening a new bag of strawberry sour belts. I sat and chewed, my taste buds almost barbed with sourness. The candy tasted like grief, but also like the emotion that follows grief. The sweetness came at the end, after the crystalline layer of acid had melted off and I could discern the syrupy fruit beneath. That’s when I could finally taste the sweet: when my lips stung and my tongue was a fierce, scraped thing.

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A FEW GLITTERING SEEDS Depending on the teller of the tale, the girl is abducted— she is raped, from the Latin rapere, meaning carried off by force, taken— or else her father agrees his daughter shall be led down to the underworld. That’s the thing about this story. So many of the details rest on who recounts it. When I was seven years old, I loved D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, a collection filled with tales of the major and minor gods, hand-drawn illustrations in vivid colors. The chapter about Persephone shows the girl reaching toward the sky, the earth opened like a mouth, Hades’s arm cinched around her as the chariot pulled by four horses the color of shadow plunges into the greater dark: A herd of pigs rooting in the meadow tumbled into the cleft, and Persephone’s cries for help died out as the ground closed again as suddenly as it had opened. Up in

SOUR the field, a little swineherd stood and wept over the pigs he had lost, while Demeter rushed wildly about in the meadow, looking in vain for her daughter, who had vanished without leaving a trace.

Although this is clearly the violent version of the myth, nonetheless I loved how the picture shows four pigs tumbling from the green ground above. Picked blossoms spill from Persephone’s hands. And the sky feels ever more distant. In the underworld Persephone is made queen, seated on a jagged throne of bones beside Hades. The daughter of two deities, Demeter and Zeus, she was born royal. She is a figure associated with the harvest, with abundance and ripeness. But in the land of death she isn’t bountiful, and the only thing she reaps is silence. After Persephone disappears, her mother looks across the earth for her. The Homeric Hymns—an ancient Greek collection written in the same meter as the epics—presents a vivid rendering of this moment in the story. “A sharp pain” seizes Demeter’s heart as she calls out for Persephone. She streaks “out like a wild bird / across dry land and sea, searching.” Underground, Persephone waits to be rescued. I imagine her breathing in the musty air of death, ash a constant dryness in her mouth. When Hades is commanded by Zeus to return the girl to the surface, The Homeric Hymns tell us the god misleads his stolen bride: “But he, stealthily, / gave her to eat a seed of the pomegranate, / honey-sweet, furtively peering around him, / so she would not stay away forever / with the venerable Demeter in her dark-blue cloak.” Often pomegranates pucker the mouth with sourness. But in this version of the narrative,

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the seeds are honey-sweet, despite their trickery. The deception doesn’t reveal itself through taste. Eavan Boland’s “The Pomegranate” presents a modern retelling of the myth. In the poem, the speaker says that Persephone’s story is the only one she has “ever loved,” because she “can enter it anywhere.” She explains that, as a young reader, she found herself in the girl’s loneliness and terror. Later, as a parent, she recognizes herself in the mother who walks across the grass, shouting her daughter’s name. The narrative is expansive. It grows large enough to include the experiences of all listeners. And as the speaker moves back and forth between the myth and the real challenges of being a parent, she illustrates the kind of worries that all mothers—whether they are goddesses or ordinary mortals—feel when they contemplate their children’s safety. Only two-thirds of the way through the poem does Boland address the famous fruit. “The pomegranate!” exclaims the speaker, “How did I forget it?” She muses that if Persephone had left the fruit untasted the story might have ended happily. But that’s not the central point of the poem. What matters is that a stomach continues to experience its familiar, piercing pangs, even when the child finds herself in a terrifying place: even in the place of death, at the heart of legend, in the midst of rocks full of unshed tears ready to be diamonds by the time the story was told, a child can be hungry.

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Yes, even in the underworld Persephone remains alive enough to need feeding. As much as Hades wants to make her a sovereign of the dead, he is attracted to her life, to her appetites that must be fed. Most storytellers agree what happens next. Once Persephone has tasted a fruit of the underworld, she no longer belongs entirely to the fields where she once gathered flowers and felt the summer air on her face. In Metamorphoses, Ovid describes how Zeus, whom the Romans called both Jupiter and Jove, arrives at a compromise. He splits the girl’s life between the worlds of the living and the dead: “great Jove dividing the year into two equal portions, / so now in two realms the shared goddess holds sway, / and as many months spent with her mother are spent with her husband.” Persephone is positioned as someone both powerless and powerful, abducted for her beauty, held captive, and yet made a queen in two domains. The classicist Edith Hamilton writes of Persephone in her famous book about Greek mythology: After the lord of the dark world below carried her away she was never again the gay young creature who had played in the flowery meadow without a thought of care or trouble. She did indeed rise from the dead every spring, but she brought with her the memory of where she had come from; with all her bright beauty there was something strange and awesome about her.

It’s a poignant portrait. Hamilton’s interpretation makes Persephone human again, a woman who has been traumatized by her own small hunger. Tasting the pomegranate

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results in terrible consequences for Persephone, not only changing her life forever but offering her painful knowledge about the weight of even the smallest actions. In fact, all human beings feel these consequences. Autumn and winter are the six months of Demeter’s grief when she is separated annually from her daughter. The whole earth goes cold when Persephone rules in the underworld, our very seasons the result of few glittering seeds, gemlike, on her tongue. Spring and summer are Demeter’s joy at having her child back in the world of the living. The pomegranate exerts its power beyond Greek culture and literature. I find it too in the writings of Rumi, the thirteenth-century poet and Sufi mystic: Come to the orchard in Spring. There is light and wine, and sweethearts in the pomegranate flowers. If you do not come, these do not matter. If you do come, these do not matter.

I find the fruit in Persian cuisine as well. The famous dish Fesenjān contains pomegranate juice that has been reduced to a thick syrup the consistency of molasses. The Qur’an mentions the pomegranate three times, including as one of the fruits that is found not in the underworld but in paradise: “when they begin to bear fruit, feast your eyes with the fruit and the ripeness thereof. Behold, in these things are Signs for people who believe.”

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In the Jewish tradition, a pomegranate is said to contain 613 seeds, the number of mitzvot or commandments that are outlined in the Torah. The pomegranate is mentioned six times just in the Song of Songs alone, linked to other symbols of the erotic and the beautiful. “Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely: thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks,” a lover intones. And elsewhere: “Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear, and the pomegranates bud forth: there will I give thee my loves.” And this: “I would lead thee, and bring thee into my mother’s house, who would instruct me: I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine of the juice of my pomegranate.” The pomegranate is a photogenic fruit. Its image wants to be preserved, to be painted, to be formed in ceramic, to be cast in silver or gold. It wants to be block-printed on wallpaper, circa 1865, a thousand fruits drooping from a thousand leafy stems. A small grenade with a red heart, it wants to be rendered in language too. Some foods carry conflicting stories inside their spongy walls. Even the question of how to open a pomegranate is not easily answered. I can divide it with a knife, split the fruit into two perfect halves, bruise many of the seeds with the edge of my blade. Or I can tear the pomegranate with my hands, a rough action that leaves the skin in ragged shreds but allows the seeds to spill out, undamaged. Either way, the work is messy. And how I do eat it then? I can taste it seed by seed. I can dig a spoon into the garnet-red interior. I can squeeze the fruit of its liquid. When it comes

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to taste, I say the pomegranate is sour. But the Persephone of the Homeric Hymns believes it is honey-sweet. Like the stories about the pomegranate, the fruit itself is capacious. Its taste is hell or heaven, punishment or prize, each seed faceted and gleaming.

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The gooseberry is a beautiful fruit, translucent green, its skin etched with veins, a delicate fuzz across the surface. When I was a child in Eastern Europe, I used to eat gooseberries during the summer months, although I didn’t wait for their season the way I did with other fruits. I could eat kilos of raspberries. I liked to place one on each fingertip like a tiny red hat. At Polna market in downtown Warsaw, I ate cherries straight from a brown paper bag. I hung doubled cherries over the tops of my ears as if they were dangling ornaments, shining pieces of costume jewelry. The gooseberry is harder to love. It doesn’t overflow with sugar. It tastes like sour grapes (and isn’t that idiom the very opposite of sweetness?). The fruits are pretty as blown-glass marbles, but perhaps taste best when boiled down to the shapelessness of preserves, their color turning from green to pale amber in the heat. I haven’t tasted a gooseberry in several decades. But every few years I reread the short stories of Anton Chekhov, including the one titled “Gooseberries.” It’s a story within a story. Two men, Ivan Ivanych and Burkin are caught in the rain. They end up stopping to visit Alyokhin,

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a friend who offers them a night of hospitality at his farm, a plain but nonetheless comfortable home. As they all settle indoors, drinking tea, Ivan recounts a tale about his brother, Nikolay. He explains that after their father died Nikolay began to imagine living in the countryside: the farm he would have, the cabbages he would grow, the meals he would eat “on the green grass.” The dream was “unimaginable,” Ivan explains, “without gooseberries.” The gooseberry bushes were an essential part of the fantasy, always featured in Nikolay’s vision of the property he would own. Hating his work as a government official, Nikolay eventually married an “elderly and ugly” widow for her money. After she died, Nikolay bought a large estate that had “no orchard, no gooseberry bushes, no duckpond.” Even though this property did not align with the fantasy, Nikolay “ordered twenty gooseberry bushes, planted them, and began living as a country gentleman.” Some years later, Ivan went to see his brother and was disgusted by what he saw; everything about the place seemed piggish and gluttonous. The dog that greeted him resembles a pig. The cook too. Even his brother, older and fatter now, looked as though “he might begin grunting . . . at any moment.” Ivan realized that Nikolay had grown opinionated and self-satisfied, utterly transformed from the timid government official he used to be. He referred to himself as a nobleman, clearly forgetting that their grandfather was a peasant. During the evening he spent with his brother, Ivan watched Nikolay eat a great bowlful of gooseberries. With each bite, Nikolay exclaimed “How delicious!” Ivan thought

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the fruits “sour and unripe,” but his brother appeared to find them sweet as syrup. As Ivan reflected on his brother’s transformation, he felt more and more disturbed. Nikolay’s pleasure, he decided, was “the insolence and idleness of the strong.” Long into the evening, he heard his brother in the room next door, getting up from the bed to eat another gooseberry. Over the course of the visit, the sour fruits planted a seed of self-awareness in Ivan’s thinking. He understood that Nikolay’s happiness was only possible because he ignored the unhappiness of the peasants. The gooseberries tasted sweet to him— a kind of defect of the senses— because his pleasure came at the expense of others; the sour fruit seemed to him all sweetness, just as the unhappy appeared to him perfectly joyful. Thinking about his brother’s contentment, Ivan realized that he too was complacent, he too liked to make sweeping proclamations about the poor and was inclined to forget that others were destitute. Ever since the visit to Nikolay’s estate, Ivan had resented his own easy life while believing himself too old to rescue the impoverished from their griefs. The story over, Ivan implores his listeners: “don’t be calm and contented, don’t let yourself be put to sleep!” He begs them to do good in the world. No one is satisfied by what they have heard. Eventually, the host goes to bed, and the visitors are led to the guestroom where the rain taps against the windowpanes like a quiet sadness knocking to get in. This closing image echoes an observation Ivan makes earlier in the narrative: “There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man someone standing

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with a hammer continually reminding him a with a tap that there are unhappy people.” Chekhov’s “Gooseberries” imbues the humble fruit with more meaning and metaphor than I could have imagined when I was a child. I can barely recall the flavor gooseberries, because to me they now taste only of Nikolay’s overindulgence and Ivan’s self-recrimination. I can’t think of the sweetness that comes when they’re reduced to jam. I can only remember the slight fur of their skins and the thorns that grow at the place where stem meets leaf.

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In the angled light of my kitchen, I take a picture of three lemons. They lean against one another—rounded shape to rounded shape—in a ceramic bowl glazed the color of afternoon sky. A nearby bowl, this one celery-green, holds a grouping of shallots. Their purple skins are misty, sheathed in the plastic folds of a produce bag from the grocery store. An artful arrangement, I think. But why should this be so? I know the answer is still life painting. In gazing at the work of the Dutch and Flemish painters of the seventeenth century, I have learned to view such arrangements as an appropriate subject for the canvas. Bowl plus fruit equals art. In my kitchen, I’m reminded of Jan Davidszoon de Heem’s Still Life with a Glass and Oysters, circa 1640. Oil on wood, it’s part of the Met’s permanent collection, a small

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oil-on-wood piece measuring only 9 7/8 x 7 1/2 inches. As the museum’s website explains: It combines some of the most frequent props of Dutch still life— a lemon peel, the type of glass known as a roemer, and oysters, which were believed at the time to have aphrodisiac properties. The diminutive scale indicates it was destined for a collector’s cabinet, meant to be pored over by a single viewer.

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In other words, the painting is a meal for one. A viewer consumes with the eyes as the first step of tasting the citrus. Looking at the still life, it’s easy to imagine the taste of the lemon juice squeezed on the gray lump of an oyster lolling in its pearlescent shell. Mark Doty’s Still Life with Oysters and Lemon begins with a meditation on de Heem’s painting. Doty writes of being in the presence of the piece: “It is an atmosphere; the light lovingly delineating these things is warm, a little fogged, encompassing, tender, ambient. As if, added to the fragrance evoked by the sharp pulp of the lemon, and the acidic wine, and the salty marsh-scent of the oysters, were some fragrance the light itself carried.” Doty speaks mostly about scent, but I would add taste to a viewer’s experience of the art. I see the lemon glowing yellow, a hue that seems the very essence of lemon—its lemonness, its lemonosity, how I can’t resist inventing a word for it—and the citric acid begins to hiss on my tongue, a response to the sight of something sour. The lemon was an important subject of still life painters in the seventeenth century. Curator and art historian Walter Liedtke writes:

SOUR In general, the rise of still-life painting in the Northern and Spanish Netherlands . . . reflects the increasing urbanization of Dutch and Flemish society, which brought with it an emphasis on the home and personal possessions, commerce, trade, learning— all the aspects and diversions of everyday life.

The lemon was a luxury good, something perishable that the artist’s gifts could immortalize. Peeled lemons were particularly popular subjects; the two sides of the spiraling rind, the glossy exterior, and the white pith, all provided an exciting challenge to the painter, an opportunity to demonstrate one’s skills with brush and lustrous pigments. The still life, with its dramatic, brooding shadows, frequently offered a moralizing message about mortality, the imminence of death, and the fleeting value of worldly pleasures, a genre known as vanitas, each meticulously rendered object transformed into a symbol. Lemons, Doty writes, were “all freedom, all ego, all vanity.” But however stern the messages of these paintings, they also remained beautiful objects to hang on the wall. They were proof of the owner’s prosperity, evidence that this was a home in which lemons were not only eaten but preserved forever as something lovely to look at. “Oysters, grapes, and even lemons were delicacies in [d]e Heem’s day,” Liedtke points out, “so that his subject suggests a certain level of society, one in which idle hours and beautiful pictures were counted among life’s rewards.” Nearly 250  years after de Heem, Vincent van Gogh expanded the Dutch tradition of painting foodstuffs carefully arranged on tabletops. Van Gogh’s still lifes are studies in

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exuberant, saturated color. They prove to the viewer that intense hues can be placed alongside one another in previously unimagined combinations. His Still Life of Oranges and Lemons with Blue Gloves, for instance, contains shades of sand, cobalt, emerald, gold, and a backdrop that is the bluish green of glass washed up from the sea. The many colors shouldn’t go together, but they do. In a letter written to his brother Theo, on January  22, 1889, van Gogh speaks about the painting: “I’ve just finished a new canvas which has an almost chic little look to it, a willow basket with lemons and oranges— a cypress branch and a pair of blue gloves, you’ve already seen some of these fruit-baskets of mine.” One blue glove sits on top of the other. The fingers are bent, almost frilled at the tips. Behind them sit bunches of tufted cypress, some of the needles bronze at their points. A woven basket lies at the center of the composition. It holds a grouping of oranges in a quiet brown, so that the eye is pulled toward the shine of the lemons, their skins a sunlit yellow. So often we use sourness as a metaphor for disposition. We call people sour, if they are disillusioned or unhappy. We turn them into still life paintings in the manner of de Heem, each object offering a lesson. Sour people are slices of lemon seated on a velvet cloth. Like the lemon, they too might once have gleamed gold. But then their souls shriveled, desiccated. All is vanity, they warn. But if we were to view these people in the way that van Gogh once approached the canvas, then we might see the sourest among us as shining objects, full of light and color. We might see them too as a luxury good. Their caustic speech polishes even the dullest conversations. Looking

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at the lemons in the basket, perhaps we can appreciate that at least the fruits do not leave us indifferent. They flicker against our eyes and make an acidic light entirely their own. The lemons pinch our mouths, a pucker that almost resembles the shape of a kiss.

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TEARLESS CENTURIES By the time we are seven or eight months old, most of us have tasted our own tears. Crying in our cribs, we feel on our tongues the saltwater, which we come to know as synonymous with I’m scared, I’m hungry, or please pick me up. And later, as adults, we recognize that while tears may occur at weddings, joyful celebrations, the birth of a child, most often weeping is associated with grief. We cry— or try not to— at funerals. We cry in the loneliness of a bedroom. Grim news arrives over the phone, on the television, at our front doors, and the tears wet our faces. Near the end of Günter Grass’s novel, The Tin Drum, the narrator describes an expensive night club where customers pay for the chance to cry. At the Onion Cellar, visitors are seated on wood crates draped in burlap. The proprietor hands each person a cutting board, a paring knife, and a yellow onion. As the clients begin to peel back the

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layers and cut into the alliums, the onions release their volatile liquids and produce the intended effect: a roomful of lamentation. The Tin Drum is set during the Second World War and the years immediately after. The novel takes place in the Free City of Danzig—now Gdańsk, in Poland— and in Düsseldorf, the citizens of these two cities consumed with trauma but barely able to express what they feel. “It is not true that when the heart is full the eyes necessarily overflow,” Grass explains, “some people can never manage it, especially in our century, which in spite of all the suffering and sorrow will surely be known to posterity as the tearless century.” The onions are an anodyne, not a cure. They draw forth from the customers long-deferred tears, like “rain,” Grass writes, as if weeping were precipitation that brings relief to the parched topography of a face. For twelve marks, visitors to the Onion Cellar can cry again, the onion juice doing “what the world and the sorrows of the world” cannot. Inside the Onion Cellar, the customers pay to confront how distant they are from themselves. This is what makes them sob: that war and genocide have split them, mind from body, like an onion sliced in half. “Maybe we cannot know the real reason why we are crying,“ writes Heather Christle in The Crying Book, her lyric meditation on tears. “Maybe we do not cry about but rather near or around.” The patrons don’t cry about war and genocide. They cry adjacent to the jagged piles of horror, the blown-up buildings and wrecked streets, because trauma demands oblique glances. Moirologists are hired to cry at people’s funerals, their renumerated wailing part theater, part tutorial. This is how

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grief looks, how it sounds. The clients of the Onion Cellar become their own professional mourners. Only by paying good money to the proprietor can they perform their sadness, learn the salted taste of their own misery. Clinical psychologist Ad Vingerhoets studies the intricacy of human tears. He argues that “crying is not just a symptom that accompanies emotions. Rather, it is a complex biopsychosocial phenomenon.” In other words, while tears often have an emotional source, there are also biological and social reasons why we cry. Which is it in the Onion Cellar— biological, psychological, or social? Perhaps, it is all three. The clients’ bodies need the physical release of weeping. Their psyches long for it. And after so much trauma the customers can only cry together in a nightclub, drunk not on vodka but on their shared sadness. People keep returning to the Onion Cellar, no doubt because the service provided there works. Salt cleanses. When we cry, our eyes are rinsed of irritants; the liquid glosses over the cornea, forms a protective layer. Tears prompted by emotions spill from the tear ducts in a way that may feel like purification. To rub salt in the wound means to make something painful hurt even more. But that’s, in fact, the ache that comes before healing. Think of what sterile saline does when it washes over an incision. Think of the small container shaped like a tiny teapot. If I have a cold, I fill the pot with lukewarm water and a solution of salt, then lean forward over the sink, angle my head sideways, press the spout to a nostril. I can feel the liquid moving through the hollow spaces in my skull, pushing toward the inner corners of my eyes. I can taste the salt at

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the back of my throat. And then for a while I can breathe again. I like to imagine that when people leave the Onion Cellar it’s late, and the sky glitters as if covered in a thin layer of frost. At night, the buildings— of Danzig, Gdańsk, whatever the temporary name of the city—become different heights of gray shadow. After many hours in the club, the customers feel dehydrated from so much weeping. They have been emptied of water. But how wonderful to realize that sobbing has not made them Lot’s wife. They have not been turned to a block of salt, simply by looking (not quite) directly at the destruction of their old lives. Yes, as Aeneas once observed in Carthage, sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangent. The world is always filled to its brim with tears. It’s a cup overflowing. Every century needs a paring knife and a cutting board and, most of all, a small onion that holds deep in its pearlescent layers all the mourning we keep from ourselves.

FIRST THE NOSE, THEN THE TONGUE Sweat. It can mean that the body is working, perhaps moving against another body, slick and naked in the dark. It can mean we are running through the afternoon heat. Sweat can mean sickness. Skin tries to cool itself. In the morning, we wake to sheets darkened with our own perspiration, a wet shadow where we curled in fever-sleep. I have sat up in the early light of the bedroom, my shirt soggy against my chest. I can’t remember what I dreamed—am I breathing hard from delicious pleasure? Or was I climbing a wall, my

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hands skidding to find some hold in the stone? Or, worse, was I dying? Think of what sweat might have represented in 1986, the year in which a deadly retrovirus was finally given the name HIV. In Perestroika, the second part of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, tasting another’s perspiration becomes a gesture both of desire and of annihilation. It’s a scene of seduction between two men, Louis and Joe. The first character has left the man he loves, having learned his boyfriend is HIV positive. And the second is a devout Mormon, married and closeted: Louis (Quietly): Ssssshhh. Smelling. And tasting. First the nose, then the tongue. Joe: I just don’t . . . Louis: They work as a team, see. The nose tells the body—the heart, the mind, the fingers, the cock—what it wants, and then the tongue explores, finding out what’s edible, what isn’t, what’s most mineral, food for the blood, food for the bones, and therefore most delectable. (He licks the side of Joe’s cheek.) Salt. (Louis kisses Joe, who holds back a moment and then responds.) Louis: Mmm. Iron. Clay. (Louis slips his hand down the front of Joe’s pants. They embrace more tightly. Louis pulls his hand out, smells and tastes his fingers, and then holds them for Joe to smell.) Louis: Chlorine. Copper. Earth. (They kiss again.)

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“Nighttime,” Joe responds, which is to say passion, oblivion, and self-loathing, the darkness a blanket that covers both men, muffles what they feel about themselves and each other. And while HIV cannot be transmitted through perspiration, in the context of the play’s setting and time, the act of ingesting another person’s excretions is not only erotic but also terrifying. “We can cap everything that leaks in latex,” Louis urges Joe, “we can smear our bodies with nonoxynol- 9, safe, chemical sex.” Sweat—its liquid saltiness—is elemental, a flavor utterly of the body. In an era when the connection between Eros and Thanatos was never more apparent, sweat must have tasted on the actors’ lips both of desire and of death. Every night, the man who played Louis stood beneath the glaring lights and slid his tongue across the other actor’s body. A performance, yes. But there would have been real intimacy too, that of papillae touching skin, saliva comingling with sweat. Angels in America wasn’t always a period piece set in a distant decade. There weren’t always pre- and postexposure prophylaxes or antiretroviral therapies taken in combinations called cocktails. In the early nineties, audiences watching Perestroika might have felt the prickles of nervousness as they thought about their own sex lives, their own precarious hungers. I like to imagine myself sitting in the theater—I would have been thirteen at the time— staring at the two actors on stage. At that age, I didn’t know

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yet what it feels like to drag one’s tongue across someone else’s neck. But I would have feared such closeness, nonetheless. I was already being taught that sex was perilous. “Just Say No,” a First Lady told the children of my generation in the public service announcements that played over and over again on after-school television; she meant “say no” to drugs, but I took her to mean passion too. Literature from or about this time is often preoccupied with perspiration, the look of it, its chilly touch, the way it smells. For instance, Mark Doty’s “At the Gym” starts with these lines: “This salt-stain spot / marks the place where men / lay down their heads, / back to the bench.“ In the poem, bodies recline, not to sleep or to have sex but to lift weights, their sweat evidence of health and virility. Still, death shadows the text. Doty describes the sweat as a “shroud-stain,” using images that evoke religious iconography. He writes that “we sweat the mark / of our presence onto the cloth,” the men made holy by their ordinary efforts in the gym. The poem ends, “Here is some halo / the living made together.” We can picture the men lying flat on the bench, pressing barbells straight up and away from their own faces, around their heads a circle of dampness like a saint’s nimbus. Even as the men push themselves “to become objects / of desire,” they are also making sleek, strong muscles, arms and legs powerful enough— they hope—to resist any illness. They are martyrs to the beauty they seek and to the body itself, which “terrifies with frailty,” HIV and AIDS never mentioned in the poem but present nonetheless, the virus that was referred to as a “gay plague” always here in the gym, a site that is at the center of gay erotic life.

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If sweat is not proof of longing or fitness, then it may be a warning sign, the skin’s way of saying, I am burning up. Rebecca Brown’s novel The Gifts of the Body is written in the voice of an anonymous home-care worker who looks after people diagnosed with AIDS. The book’s opening chapter, “The Gift of Sweat,” demonstrates how perspiration acts a signal to the narrator, an indication that her charge, a man named Rick, has become dangerously ill. She finds him wrapped in a quilt; he shivers, pulses with fear, his forehead “wet and hot.” They wait together for the woman who will take Rick to the hospital. The narrator embraces the trembling man, holding him tightly as if she can use her own strength to “press the sickness out.” Later, as she cleans his rooms, she can smell Rick’s fever on her own body. “My face was splotched,” she observes. “My T-shirt had a dark spot. I put my hands to it and sniffed them. They smelled like me, but also him. It was Rick’s sweat. I put my hands up to my face and I could smell him in my hands.” Given the grief of this chapter, it might surprise us that Brown presents sweat as a gift. But  have you ever found someone drenched in sweat, almost unable to stand without the help of your hands lifting from under the armpit, your hips pressed against theirs in leverage? I am burning up, the skin says. Sweat is a gift because it alerts us. It is the terror of a body boiling. “Call 911,” we cry out. But sweat is also evidence that the heart hasn’t stopped beating yet—“thank god,” we whisper—that the pores go on releasing ammonia and salt.

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THIRSTY FOR DAYS My old copy of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable has dozens of entries under the word salt. There’s salt lick. We can salt an account. We can salt a mine. We salt away or down. There is a covenant of salt. We can say about a man, he won’t earn salt for his porridge. Apparently, we also say, If the salt has lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? Of course, we say that someone isn’t worth his salt. We sit above the salt. We are true to our salt. We take information with a grain or pinch of salt. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable also reminds me that to spill salt was considered “an unlucky omen by the Romans.” Indeed, in Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper there’s a small detail placed alongside Judas’s arm that prefigures his betrayal. The disciple has knocked over a salt cellar, its contents tumbling in a small white mound across the linen cloth. The devil apparently “hates salt.” The making of holy water requires it. Salt preserves. It cures meats. In pickling it’s a crucial part of the brine. Salt it is often the last ingredient we add to a dish. In the right amount it makes the sweet sweeter, conceals the bitterness, makes the savory more satisfying in the mouth. Too much salt leaves the tongue thirsty for days. Yet, in some ways, the mouth is nostalgic for such flavors. Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, which are part of the holdings at the Museum of Modern Art, form an installation measuring approximately eight feet by thirteen and a half

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feet. All I can think is so much salt. A serving of Campbell’s Tomato Soup has 480 mg of salt, Cream of Celery 850 mg, Chicken Noodle 890 mg. I imagine no piece of art has ever tasted saltier. To look at these images, to gaze at that great wall of sodium must leave the eyes parched. Even though there are thirty-two different flavors on thirty-two individual canvases, there’s a vast sameness to the images. Thirty-two cans, of course, because that’s how many flavors Campbell’s offered in 1962, the year Warhol produced these images. Each can is divided symmetrically in half, the top portion red and the bottom white. Each contains the white cursive loops of the word Campbell’s and beneath it in smaller block letters the word CONDENSED. In every painting there is the same circle of gold positioned at the exact center of the label and the chain of fleur-de-lis stamped near the base of the can. I study the silkscreened objects and do not see the individual flavors of Cream of Mushroom or Chili Beef. During a famous interview from 1963, Warhol explained why Campbell’s of all the assembly-line foods of the midcentury: “I used to have the same lunch every day for twenty years . . . soup and a sandwich, soup for lunch.” The sandwich with its floppy slices of bread and lumpy filling is unrepeatable on Warhol’s canvases. The sandwich isn’t vacuum-packed or sealed in a metal sarcophagus. While its separate components—the spongy white bread, the cheese slick as a piece of orange plastic— are highly processed, the sandwich itself is made by hand. But the soup cans circle on belts in an automated factory, clickclicking against the metal claws of a machine. And when

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they are finally wrapped in paper labels, they remain anonymous, one can of Campbell’s Soup like all the others. In Warhol’s depictions of the cans, I find the twentiethcentury ritual of mass production, images infinitely duplicating themselves, and the cold religion of capitalism in all its aluminum holiness. Maybe all this salt offers a new form of purification. These paintings seem to ask the viewer: What if you could be blessed by the touch of Turkey Vegetable Soup? What if you could be washed clean in a river of Campbell’s Minestrone? The cans are like holy icons to which museumgoers might direct their prayers. Under the bright gallery lights, the pious might kneel and lift their spoons toward the canvases, asking the sealed cans for the humble blessing of salt.

CURED IN BRINE When I was child, my mother often made for me on weekends a special treat: a piece of bread spread with soft chèvre, the cheese dotted with thin slices of manzanilla olives, green-red circles against a backdrop of white. I always ate slowly on those days, careful that each bite contained all three ingredients. Bread. Cheese. Olive. I liked the taste of each thing on its own, but together they were a meal, not a snack. Olives begin their lives in bitterness, but that’s not where they end. Food journalist Georgeanne Brennan explains in her cookbook, Olives, Anchovies, and Capers: The Secret Ingredients of the Mediterranean Table, that “fresh from the

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tree they contain a phenolic compound, oleuropein, which makes them bitter.” Soon after picking and to make them edible, olives must be cured with lye, suspended in a salt brine, or washed and washed in fresh water. They ferment, the oleuropein pulled from their skins, their flesh turning rich from weeks of sitting in glassy darkness. Every region has its own method of preparation, a different technique for persuading the olives to give up their acrimony. When they are added to a dish, Brennan explains, “a palette of flavors is achieved that would normally require several different ingredients and techniques.” Small globes or eggshaped, olives contain a universe of tastes. In  A. E. Stallings’s poem “Olives,” a speaker observes that sometimes we long “for salt, not sweet,” for fruits that have been “pickled in a vat of tears.” While cured olives no longer taste caustic, they retain some grief from their days of resting in so much salt. In their many hues, in their ranges of “blacks and blues,” they display colors “that chart the slow chromatics of a bruise.” According to the poem, we eat olives because we crave their tearfulness. But we also ingest them for the glittering histories they contain, the weeks they spent on the branches luxuriating in Mediterranean sunshine. When we consume olives, we swallow their memories of ripening and falling into the nets positioned among the trees. “These fruits are mine—,” says the speaker, “Small bitter drupes, / Full of the golden past and cured in brine.” Curing endows foods with temporary immortality, to coin an oxymoron. Brine is like the peat bogs that once preserved the bodies of other eras, their features held perfectly intact, undisturbed in the water. Olive trees

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themselves can seem almost eternal. They have endured across centuries, across the turbulent lives of empires, invasions and evacuations, storms and calm weather. Olives are objects of duality: not so much the opposition of bitter and sweet but of bitter and savory. According to Stallings, olives possess contradictory flavors, their pulp recalling not only “the harvest” but also “the toil.” They have at their center a sharp stone, but their ripened flesh is meaty and dense with oil. We only have to taste a few to know their sunny disposition. Of course, they’re “pickled in a vat of tears,” as the poem claims; they are also buoyant in the salt water, floating in a tiny current of optimism, even joy. How can something the shape and weight of a pebble have had such an oversized influence in so many cultures? “Olives have oiled the wheels of civilization since Jericho built walls and ancient Greece was the morning news,” writes journalist Mort Rosenblum. “From the first Egyptians, they have symbolized everything happy and holy in the Mediterranean.” It’s easy to imagine why the olive might be a source of happiness. The olive itself must be joyful to come from a tree that is always valued for what it gives, treasured for its oil and fruit, loved for the silverygreen of the shade it extends to a tired traveler. The tree was a present from Athena to the city that then took her name in gratitude. The people of Athens loved the olives and worshipped the grey-eyed goddess who understood the worth of her largesse, a tree that would go on flowering, forever giving of itself. There was nothing particularly holy about the openfaced sandwich my mother made for me when I was a child. It was simply one of our secular rituals, undoubtedly

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happy, but modest too. Rosenblum makes large claims about the olive, arguing for its dominance, not only on the dinner plate but also in the temple where its oil served as a source of light: “After eight thousand years of healing, illuminating, nourishing, enriching, and inspiring, the olive’s place at the bottom of a glass is no bit part. Without its ennobling presence, a martini is no more than gin and vermouth.” This I do understand. The inexpensive, grocery store olives my mother sliced into thin Os and placed in a random pattern were an ennobling presence. They transformed the simple chèvre and bread into something more. They offered me salt—not quite lachrymal but still a little forlorn— and warm afternoons in an orchard far away.

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FRAGRANT THOUGHTS For decades, I was a serious tea drinker. I worried about the source of my water and what temperature it should reach. I tested ratios of liquid to leaf. I experimented with how long to brew, what vessel should be used for the steeping, the best technique for straining the soggy clump when the timer began to beep. This anxious work was an essential pleasure of the beverage. To be a tea drinker, I decided, was to practice particular steps, always trying to do better than the day before. The tea deserved nothing less than my effort at perfection. As much as I loved my daily practice, I often felt uneasy that I should care about something so trivial. The preparation of a cup of tea helped no one, impacted nothing beyond the brief happiness of my morning. But when I read The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzō, I find reassurance that an appreciation of the beautiful—the

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fragrant tins of tea, the delicate cups— does not have to be proof of superficiality. First published in 1906, Kakuzō’s book asserts that “tea began as medicine and grew into a beverage. In China, in the eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of aestheticism—Teaism.” He goes on to say that the “philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature.” Kakuzō does not dismiss as trivial the sensory pleasures of tea and its accoutrements; rather the tea ceremony is an event both aesthetic and spiritual, a way of expressing what it means to live attentively and in balance with the world around us. Kakuzō wrote The Book of Tea in English and for an American audience. A Japanese art critic and scholar, welltraveled and highly sought after for his expertise, Kakuzō served as a curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for nearly the last ten years of his life. He spent time in the city’s most elegant social circles, including that of heiress and art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner. Perhaps surprisingly, the two became close friends and confidants. Gardner, of course, is immortalized in John Singer Sargent’s portrait from 1888. In the painting, she stands in a plunging black dress, the shape of her body accentuated by the elaborate tapestry that hangs behind her. She stares directly at the viewer, her gaze provocative and frank, pearls at her neck and waist. Her mouth is slightly open, as if even in the midst of being rendered in oils on canvas, she can’t stop herself from elegant conversation.

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Today the painting is displayed in the Gothic Room of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, lighted by stained glass windows. On display at the museum too is a gift from Kakuzō to Gardner: a tea set containing several hand-painted bowls of different sizes and shapes, a lidded caddy, a bamboo scoop with a long, slender handle, a whisk for frothing matcha, an iron pot for heating water. He sent it to her from Japan in 1905. “Earlier that year,” the museum’s website explains, “he had conducted the tea ceremony (chanoyu) by candlelight one evening at the Museum. . . . Following tea practices established over several centuries, Kakuzō gathered objects of divers materials, colors, textures, origins, and dates.” The tea set—its disparate items brought gracefully together— echoes the qualities a reader will find in The Book of Tea, a text that fuses the history of the tea ceremony with an analysis of Japanese flower arranging and a discussion of the traditional architecture of a tearoom. Kakuzō argues that “humanity has so far met in the tea cup.” Although the cup is a small thing we lift easily with our hands, he offers an explanation for its importance, both as a symbol and as a real object to contemplate: “But when we consider how small all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea cup.” Kakuzō’s words are as meticulous and precise as are the steps of the traditional tea ceremony. For example, here’s how he describes the ordinary act of heating water: “There are three stages of boiling: the first boil is when the

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little bubbles like the eyes of fishes swim on the surface; the second boil is when the bubbles are like crystal beads rolling in a fountain; the third boil is when the billows surge wildly in the kettle.” The ceremony is conducted in a room designed to serve as “a sanctuary from the vexations of the outer world,” a place of respite, “not a word to break the unity of the surroundings, all movements to be performed simply and naturally.” Teaism is more than the art of making, drinking, and appreciating tea; it is, as Kakuzō frames it, “Taoism in disguise,” with Taoism furnishing “the basis for aesthetic ideals” and “Zennism” making these ideals “practical.” But even for those of us who are not practitioners of Taoism or of Japanese Zen Buddhist philosophy, it’s possible to appreciate Kakuzō’s emphasis on the need for balance in our lives. To do a small thing very well—to brew a cup of tea thoughtfully, attentively—is to partake of some portion of the balance that is achieved when a tea master whisks a pinch of matcha in a cup, the water swirling into a sudden verdancy. Experts of tea speak about the drink’s character. They talk of leaves that are clean or coarse. They refer to softness or strength. These are the same kinds of words we use to describe people, and I imagine Kakuzō would have concurred that a cup of tea can reflect the temperament of its maker. A badly made cup of tea offends the senses. Bobbing a teabag up and down in lukewarm water— as though fishing for some flavor—ignores the vast history of the beverage. The water darkens but offers none of the appealing tannins that blur the tongue. Tea cannot be made quickly.

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It requires time: to heat the water to the right temperature, to brew in a pot or cup, even to drink, little sips at first, then longer ones as the liquid cools. To say that the preparation of tea is a contemplative act feels almost self-evident. But why? Perhaps it’s because a cup of steeping tea is an image evocative of thought. The leaves float, gradually suffusing the hot water with their flavor and color. They give themselves over to the liquid, and, in turn, the liquid is altered by its contact with the tea. The world suffuses the mind. Its sights and sounds float inside us, steeping there. Of all the leaves I once loved to prepare, my favorite was a Chinese green tea scented with jasmine. Hand-formed into tiny beads called pearls, the leaves gradually open in the water, as if blossoming. The air is perfumed with flowers. A well-brewed cup of jasmine pearls is neither too bitter nor too floral but slightly astringent and sweet. Every morning, when I tasted the tea, I pictured the white clusters of petals, indolic on the vines, and felt as if I were infused with their oils, my thoughts fragrant, the pale green of spring grasses glazed with dew.

SMALL CUPS OF SHADOW In the diner, no one is eating. Three customers lean on their tall stools, none of them speaking. And behind the counter a soda jerk bends to retrieve something we can’t see. Like a bartender, his job is to serve lonely people late at night, to pour them drinks, because that’s all they want in front of them: sturdy cups of coffee, cooling and forgotten.

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This is Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, one of the bestknown American images of the twentieth century. As with many of Hopper’s paintings, the canvas asks us to gaze through a window—the diner seems made almost entirely of glass—to watch people who do not know they’re being watched. A window contradicts itself. Both a barrier and an act of transparency, it keeps us out and lets us in. “No one is there to share what we see,” explains the poet Mark Strand in an essay about Nighthawks, “and no one has come before us. The scene of the picture belongs only to us. And what we experience will be entirely ours.” We stare at the four people in the restaurant as if we are the first ones to discover this sad tableau, and we wonder about the patrons, “What are they thinking?” their faces reduced to the simple shapes of eyes, nose, and mouth. There’s a woman at the lunch counter. She was modeled by Hopper’s wife, Jo. But, still, she could be a sex worker, we think, her dress the red of desire, her hair a small, controlled flame. She holds what looks like a matchbook in her hands and studies it. A man in a slick blue suit sits beside her. He could be her john. They are close enough to touch but don’t, his hand curled around a cigarette. They are together. They are apart. We can’t help trying to read a narrative in the air between their bodies. Around the corner of the counter, a few seats away, a man sits with his back to us. His suit is made of darkness, his film noir fedora casting more dusk across the side of his face. He is the mood of America in early 1942, Pearl Harbor having been bombed only a month and a half before the completion of the painting. It’s possible to see menace in him, the posture of a threat. He might be a man

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about to trade his suit in for another kind of uniform. Or, perhaps, he’s old enough to remember the last war, the acrid mist of mustard gas, the instant coffee he drank from a tin cup at the front. The diner cuts a hard angle into the street; other buildings positioned behind it appear flattened and twodimensional, like a set for a play. As is often the way with Hopper’s work, even the lighting here is theatrical. Inside the restaurant, on this night of solitude, no fluorescent lighting has ever been this sallow, has ever cast such a queasy, green glow across the floor. And the only door visible in the diner leads to the kitchen, not to the world outside. If these people wish to go, they will have to leave by an exit out of view, offstage. When I was a young woman, I worked as a barista in a tiny coffee shop. And, although I poured many shots of espresso, steamed gallons of milk over the years, most of my days were spent brewing vats of coffee. I learned to expect the burn of hot liquid spilled on my hands, the coffee slopping over the rim of the paper cup as I covered it with a plastic lid. I learned to expect the smell of stale beans in the seams of my clothes. Still that initial sip of bitterness each morning never stopped surprising me, even when I came to like it. Coffee is what we drink to wake up or to stay awake. It’s the drink of early risers and workaholics. Also insomniacs. As adults, many of us come to crave this brown sludge, surely the very definition of an acquired taste. When I was a barista, my first customers of the day always ordered their coffee black, no milk or sugar to soften its sharp edge. The customers who came in just before I closed the store

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for the evening took theirs straight as well, often on their way to the late shift at the hospital down the street. The shop where I worked was nothing like the diner in Nighthawks. It had brief, smudged windows and a straightforward exit to the outside. But I served many people who resembled the ones in the painting. I watched them ruminate over their small cups of shadow, alone even in their togetherness. “What is it about Hopper?” asks Olivia Laing in The Lonely City. “He never much liked the idea that his paintings could be pinned down, or that loneliness was his métier, his central theme.” Haven’t we all hunched over our coffees like this, Hopper’s theme equally our own? At some late hour, we have all felt utterly by ourselves in rooms where the light seemed suddenly strange, so green, as if rendered with meticulous brushstrokes. How still we have sat in the sickly, bitter light.

BITTER ELIXIRS When I was a little girl, I often saw my father drinking chocolate syrup straight from the plastic bottle. The sight of him standing in the kitchen late at night, tipping the dark stream into his mouth, always shocked me. I knew this was an ingredient intended as a shiny topping for ice cream or meant to be diluted in a glass of milk. Drinking something so rich in its unadulterated state was, I knew, illicit and wrong. My father didn’t have in mind chocolate’s ancient origins when he took a quick swig of the sugary liquid. But as

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Sophie and Michael Coe write in The True History of Chocolate, “during nine tenths of its long history, chocolate was drunk, not eaten.” Many of us may picture a dark bar in a brown and silver wrapping when we hear the word “chocolate.” Yet the food existed well before the chalky stuff that was handed out to American soldiers as part of their field rations during World War II. Long before the arrival of Columbus or Hernán Cortés, it was a beverage that served many functions in the great cultures of Mexico and Central America, not only social but also sacred and commercial. Writing about the Maya and later the Aztecs, Sophie and Michael Coe explain that “Pre-Conquest chocolate was not a single concoction to be drunk; it was a vast and complex array of drinks, gruels, porridges, powders, and probably solid substances, to all of which could be added a wide variety of flavorings.” And while the Aztecs are often credited with inventing chocolate, it was in fact the Maya peoples “who first taught the Old World how to drink chocolate, and it was the Maya who gave us the word ‘cacao.’ They deserve recognition in the culinary history of Theobroma cacao.” In Mort Rosenblum’s Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light, the writer underscores this assertion, writing that “for all the reverence early Mexicans attached to their chocolate, cacao was also the food of earlier gods.” It was the Maya who drank “a sacred foaming brew made from toasted cacao,” while the Aztecs then “made cacao a holy fetish and incorporated the gods’ elixirs into their grand ceremonies.” Chocolate and its many identities: solid and fluid, the stuff of science and mysticism, of brain chemistry and the beating secrets of the human heart.

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Laura Esquivel’s novel, Like Water for Chocolate, examines the ingredient’s character, that it is temperamental and refuses easy analysis. The book takes its title from the expression como agua para chocolate, which means to be furious, “on the verge of boiling over.” Chocolate and water are a combative pairing; they must be blended carefully or the chocolate will seize, turn to grit and sand. And yet the traditional recipe for chocolate caliente requires hot water, the beverage frothed with a molinillo, a wooden whisk that blends the chocolate and water, despite their resistance to merging. Tita de la Garza, the protagonist of Like Water for Chocolate, has a charmed connection to food. The meals she cooks are spiced and scented with her emotions, so that anyone who eats her dishes is overcome by the passions and pains Tita has experienced in the kitchen. The book balances her practical magic with precise, step-by-step instructions for preparing dishes such as quail in rose petal sauce or turkey mole with almonds and sesame seeds. In a section about making hot chocolate, Esquivel shows, in meticulous detail, the toasting of chocolate beans in metal pans, that they must be removed from the heat at just the right moment, then cleaned and ground, divided into chunks, before being shaped into “square or round” tablets, marked with the tip of a knife so that they can be snapped into smaller pieces for later use. She goes on to explain: “in this house they made hot chocolate like nobody else’s, since they took so much care with every step in making it, from its preparation to the whipping of the chocolate, yet another critical procedure. Inexpert beating can turn an excellent-quality chocolate into a disgusting

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drink, either by under- or overcooking, making it too thick or even burnt.” This passage has the instructive, rational quality of a recipe. Like Water for Chocolate is also a novel in which people weep gallons of tears or else burst into flames, desire like a match sparking inside them. The book shifts between these two modes—half cookbook, half magical realist romance—in a manner that seems to express the complexities of chocolate itself. In another chocolate-infused novel, Joanne Harris’s Chocolat, the author saves some of her most lyric language for describing the metamorphosis that chocolate undergoes: There is a kind of alchemy in the transformation of base chocolate into this wise fool’s-gold, a layman’s magic that even my mother might have relished. . . . The mingled scents of chocolate, vanilla, heated copper, and cinnamon are intoxicating, powerfully suggestive; the raw and earthy tang of the Americas, the hot and resinous perfume of the rain forest. This is how I travel now, as the Aztecs did in their sacred rituals: Mexico, Venezuela, Columbia. The court of Montezuma. Cortés and Columbus. The Food of the Gods, bubbling and frothing in ceremonial goblets. The bitter elixir of life.

Here, one of the book’s narrators, Vianne Rocher, experiences the transportive effects of chocolate, which she calls “bitter elixir of life.” An elixir can be either magic or medicine. The word comes to us through alchemy, the medieval discipline that sought to turn base metals into gold. The bitterness of which Vianne speaks can refer to the food’s

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aftertaste, earthy and a little acrid. But the history of chocolate too leaves behind its own bitterness. The Coes write that, in response to the conquistadors’ efforts to claim as their own everything they saw and touched and tasted in the Americas, “the native peoples of the new lands had to cope with the renaming and re-interpretation of their familiar acquaintances of millennial standing, under duress from the Europeans.” Unlike the failed efforts of alchemy, the transformations enacted on chocolate are very real: spread across a marble slab, white chocolate swirled to glossiness, cocoa nibs dusted with powder, chocolate stirred and crushed beneath a rolling pin or sprinkled through a sieve, chocolate poured from the spout of a copper pot, chocolate mixed with spices. There are chocolate hearts wrapped in red foil. There is chocolate made to resemble buildings and women, tiny shells washed up from the sea. As the couverture softens over the heat, its aroma carries Vianne to the places where the food was born. Even as her mind drifts like vapor into the past, her hands continue to do the methodical work of tempering, the controlled cooling of molten chocolate, a delicate process that crystallizes the cocoa butter. Well-tempered chocolate has a sleek surface. It breaks satisfyingly, neither too hard nor too soft against the teeth. It dissolves on the tongue, releasing its dark mixture of bitter-fat-sweet. Badly tempered chocolate is easy to identify, its exterior dull, its texture like silt. There is a direct correlation between how the chocolate looks and how it tastes. Its beauty is not superficial but, rather, proof of deliciousness.

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As delectable as I find the taste of chocolate, I’m equally to attracted to its presence on the page. Words delight in the malleability of this ingredient because words themselves are malleable and melting things. When we read about chocolate, we are asked to imagine it for ourselves, to make pictures of it in our thoughts. Our minds are the molds into which chocolate is poured. As readers, we participate in its making and eating. Books such as Like Water for Chocolate and Chocolat get it right. Chocolate is part science and part magic; the ingredient contains millennia of mythology, but there’s also real chemistry to explain why it does what it does to us. Sophie and Michael Coe point out that, in addition to caffeine, chocolate contains the alkaloid theobromine, which “is said to be mood-enhancing, and is a known stimulant, vasodilator, and diuretic.” Every year, new scientific studies offer data about chocolate’s salutary effects on our health or attempt to elucidate why our brains and bodies are so altered by the ingestion of chocolate. So many experts performing tests in laboratories. So many experiments and double-blind studies. I wonder if these white-coated trials aren’t merely a way of justifying why we love what we love. Having recently given up coffee and tea, I drink a small mug of cacao every morning. I place six brown discs in the cup, pour hot water over them, drizzle in some agave nectar, a splash of steamed almond milk, then blend it all with a tiny, battery-powered whisk. The drink thickens to mud if I let it sit too long and must be thinned with water again. What I make is hardly ceremonial. The Maya peoples would not have recognized this beverage as anything

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resembling the food that, in their world, was also currency, royal elixir, medicine, even something precious to be buried with the dead. Nonetheless, when I sip my warmed chocolate, it’s easy to understand why this, of all foods, has so occupied the imagination for so many thousands of years. On my bag of cacao discs, the contents are described as having notes of fig, tobacco, and leather. I’m not sure that I can detect these flavors. But each day when I drink (perhaps I should call it an elixir), I feel the chocolate as a heat in the limbs, the fuzzy bitterness of the tannins melting into sugar on the tongue, and a soft, abiding oil on the lips. 86

THE BOND OF LIVING THINGS Some vegetables require patience, time, and ingenuity to soften. They take many hours to meld with the other flavors in the pot. Cooked greens are proof that someone skilled in the kitchen can make the delicious even out of the bitter. The ingredients merge, salt rubbing against bacon grease and pressing into the sturdy leaves, heated until it all becomes a tender swirl, both sturdy and liquid. This is soul food, which, as food scholar Adrian Miller explains, is a cuisine that responded “to racial caste dictates as African Americans asserted their humanity. Food was one avenue to create identity, instill pride, and underscore a triumphal narrative.” For many communities in the African diaspora, food became a way to affirm the possibility of constructing a small

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place of nourishment and comfort, even in a landscape of enslavement. “Greens are an appropriate metaphor for how the enslaved asserted their autonomy because they often did so through gardening,” writes Miller. Those who “were allowed to garden took full advantage of the small privilege.” A dish such as cooked greens— often made from kale, collard, or mustard greens—grounded those who had been violently uprooted and connected the generations that came after to the ancestors who first prepared this food. And as scholar Jessica B. Harris points out, “not only the foodstuff made its way across the Atlantic; so did the basic cooking techniques.” Enslaved Africans recreated many of the dishes they had once prepared in their homelands, which were often “variations on a soupy stew over a starch.” These traditional techniques are still used in contemporary Southern cooking, observes Harris: “It has been that way for centuries and remains that way today. Any Southerner who has ever sopped the potlikker from a mess of greens with a piece of cornbread would be right at home.” In her poem “cutting greens,” Lucille Clifton demonstrates how even the seemingly ordinary act of preparing food in the kitchen can become an opportunity for profound reflection: on the body, on power, and on the work of poetry itself. The title tells us what the speaker is doing; she’s cutting greens so that she can cook them. Within the first line, however, the poet immediately begins to exercise her imagination on the ingredients at hand. The speaker personifies the leafy vegetables, stating that “i hold their bodies in obscene embrace.” The greens transform into figures that are made to clasp and unclasp, erotically but also in a way that disquiets.

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The speaker explains that, in this moment, she isn’t thinking about her “kinship” with the food before her, a word that suggests family, the connections of blood or shared origins. Instead, she’s detached, in the way that people so often are in the kitchen, chopping and slicing, while the mind floats somewhere else, perhaps reflecting on the events of the day or dreaming of how the meal will soon taste. With impartiality, the speaker observes that the collards and kale appear to resist contact with one another. She has forced them into intimacy with her “kissmaking hands.” Here, Clifton creates a compound word, an adjective of her own invention that brings together the softness of a kiss with the forcefulness of the verb to make. And she deftly employs the word “strain,” with its various connotations. As a verb it means to push or pull. To injure. To drain liquid. As a noun it can refer to lineage. In Clifton’s lines, a reader can hear all these definitions mingling. At exactly the midpoint of the poem, a turn in the narrative occurs. As the speaker continues to cut the collards and kale, she suddenly notices the cast iron pot, the blackness of the cutting board and of her hands, and the greens that “roll black” beneath her knife. What began as absentminded chopping has become a moment of connection that is both thrilling and unnerving. If the greens now have bodies that can be pressed into union, then the speaker must examine her relationship to power. How, on the page, does she assert herself, the poet controlling the placement of each image, the meticulous crafting of each line? And, beyond the page, how has she been controlled by others? How have others exerted their power over her,

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her kin, her ancestors? As she approaches the closing lines of the poem, Clifton writes that “the kitchen twists dark on its spine;” the very room is personified, given a spine that can twist or, more terrifyingly, that can be twisted. Maybe the intense physicality of this scene is meant to convey what it takes to prepare delicious greens, the vigorous scrubbing to loosen the sand, the slow, long heat that drags the bitterness from the leaves, how some cooks scoop the broth from the bottom of pot to use in their next batch, a liquid suffused with the memory of smoke and spice and salt. Maybe the poet is also making a judgment about her own artful abilities. She uses language to meld together delicious flavors, but her speech can also be a thing that slices, that possesses the heat of an open flame. In making a metaphor, she imposes her will on a world that often tries to silence the voices of Black women. The poem ends with a complex assertion: “and I taste in my natural appetite / the bond of live things everywhere.” Is appetite—hunger, desire, craving, preference—something to fear or to embrace? Here, the speaker’s appetite is for what she calls “the bond,” a word that can mean a relationship or connection but can also imply a rope or other form of restraint. The poem’s genius lies in its apparent simplicity (the same can be said for the genius of a plate of greens). A reader enters the text only to discover that the poem resists easy digestion. “cutting greens” asks us to examine our own relationships with the foods we eat. The poem encourages each of us to think critically about the modest, familiar vegetables on our tables, how they too are living bodies carrying within them legacies of trauma and of love.

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COUNT UP THE ALMONDS

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Planted deep within our temporal lobe are a paired mass of nuclei known as the amygdalae, from the Latin meaning almond. Shaped, in fact, like a pair of almonds, the amygdalae process emotions. They sift through memories for storage in the brain. The amygdalae help to keep us alive, letting us know what to fear, which sound in the quiet house should startle us awake, which sideways movement in the grass is a venomous snake. It’s unlikely that Paul Celan— one of the most important poets of the Shoah—was considering neuroscience when he wrote “Count Up the Almonds,” which appears in his 1952 collection Poppy and Memory. The text is driven by its use of imperatives, authoritative and unnerving, physical rather than cerebral. In John Felstiner’s translation, the poem begins: “Count up the almonds, / count what was bitter and kept you waking, / count me in too.” Here, the order to count almonds evokes the Nazis’ compulsive mandate to tally everything in neat, disciplined columns: trains, shipments of supplies and people, the numbers of those shot or gassed. Felstiner suggests that “Celan’s triple imperative on zählen (“count”) also rings of the Zählappell, a head count in Nazi camps. And it’s possible, though only just, to think here of the smell of almonds given off by Zyklon B, the gas the SS used.” In Felstiner’s translation, the speaker counts himself among the dead. And the dead—who are they? Well, the poem can be read as an address to the speaker’s mother who, along with Celan’s father, was murdered in

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a concentration camp, and whose presence shadows much of the poet’s work. Celan, a Romanian Holocaust survivor, is notoriously difficult to parse, his poems often filled with silences, emblematic objects, and the contortion of syntax. The literary critic George Steiner argues that Celan’s native German reads as if it has been translated from another language: “In the process the receptor-language becomes unhoused, broken, idiosyncratic almost to the point of non-communication. It becomes a ‘meta- German’ cleansed of historical-political dirt and thus, alone, usable by a profoundly Jewish voice after the holocaust.” On the page, Celan’s fluent German is alienated from culture, dislocated and deracinated, a dialect of smoke and ash. We find this kind of challenging language in the middle stanzas of “Count Up the Almonds.” The speaker continues to address his mother, a figure who gazes out at the world but isn’t seen in return. She exists in a landscape that feels strange and uncanny, stripped of landmarks, containing little more than the small solidity of a few blades of grass, a droplet of dew. Theodor  W. Adorno argues that Celan’s poems “imitate a language beneath the helpless language of human beings, indeed beneath all organic language: It is that of the dead speaking of stones and stars.” In “Count Up the Almonds,” the mother stands between two realms, the underworld and the world of the death camp, both sites equally disorienting. It seems her body has been separated from her soul; the two parts approach one another “on steady feet.” And as we near the poem’s final stanza, “what’s dead” puts its arm

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around the woman, “and the three”—the dead, the mother’s physical form, and her spirit—walk away into the evening. The poem ends with two more imperatives, the speaker now directing orders only at himself. “Render me bitter,” he commands. “Number me among the almonds.” In nature, bitter tastes are a signal of danger. Our tongues have receptors that can identify the bitter so that we know to spit out the meat gone bad, the fruit that will sicken us. The speaker has been rendered bitter. He has been made poisonous to others and to himself. He has lived past the atrocity of the Shoah, but also hasn’t, possesses a body, yet barely exists inside it, sees the world from within the haze of the afterlife. Celan’s almonds represent the many dead, a number like six million almost innumerable (although how we want to count them, how we want to calculate the meaning of each of the murdered). The almonds also embody the bitterness of a very particular form of horror: genocide. The speaker feeds off their poison, is nourished by the same memories that hurt him, by the dead and the way they were murdered. While today we think of almonds as the flavor of cakes or afterdinner liqueurs, almonds that grow in the wild are often toxic, producing enough cyanide to be lethal. It is only our civilizing influence that has turned the seeds sweet. Human beings have cultivated almonds into gentleness, farmers domesticating trees to breed out the toxins. Celan’s poem reminds us that almonds are easily made bitter again. And wasn’t it a country known for its culture, its civility and civilization, that produced the Shoah? Didn’t

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that very civilizing influence lead to Auschwitz and Treblinka and Majdanek and all the other terrorizing sites with their hard, poisonous names?

ANOTHER WAY OF SAYING ANNIHILATION In the beginning is the chord. The audience waits in the darkness for a resolution to what they feel—that this painful desire might play on forever—waiting for the slow notes to cease or return. Interruptions of silence and the chord refusing to resolve. Hours of residing in ambiguity. And then, finally, the music arrives at the still place of death where it can finally rest. Or, to put things more plainly, the opening chord of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, commonly known as the “Tristan chord,” is unconsummated longing made into sound. Philosopher Bryan Magee writes that the chord “contains within itself not one but two dissonances, thus creating within the listener a double desire, agonizing in its intensity, for resolution. The chord to which it then moves resolves one of these dissonances but not the other, thus providing resolution-yet-not-resolution.” This goes on for three acts, Magee explains, continuing “throughout a whole evening. Only at one point is all discord resolved, and that is on the final chord of the work.” I was eleven or twelve the first time I heard it. I had been reading a book of Arthurian legends. Wasn’t it amazing, I mused to my father, that a love potion could bind together two people who hated each other.

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“No,” he answered, and I can hear him saying, “that isn’t it. The potion is merely an excuse that allows them to admit their love.” It was already afternoon. My father went over to the CD player and dropped the first disc into the circular darkness. He hit PLAY on the machine. It must have been well past dinnertime when the opera ended. I sat there on the couch, not knowing how to explain what I had just heard. Those lingering, anxious notes. Those melodious layers of shame and betrayal and passion. Onboard a ship and nearing the coast of Cornwall, where Isolde will meet her betrothed, King Marke, the bride decides to kill herself and Tristan. He is the man charged with escorting her to the wedding. He is also responsible for murdering her first fiancé, Morold. Isolde, the daughter of a sorceress, knows her mother’s arts well. The best way to kill Tristan, she decides, is with poison. They will drink from the same chalice and die by the same venom, what she calls the “death potion.” Isolde summons her maid, Brangäne, instructing her to prepare the “expiatory” tonic, a draft of atonement. Tristan will pay for Morold’s death and for the treachery that came after when, wounded and dying, he placed himself in a barge and floated to the shores of Ireland. There Isolde healed him, not realizing this man who called himself Tantris was the same one who had slaughtered Morold. She only learned who he was when she matched a notch of metal pulled from her dead fiancé’s skull with the chipped sword that Tantris carried. She should have killed Tristan then, but she couldn’t. This failure was her betrayal; it is why she must drink the poison too.

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When Brangäne reacts with horror at the plan, Isolde sings in a rage. Her mother prepared her with magic for all the ailments and griefs of being human: She gave me a balm for pain and wounds, an antidote for terrible poisons. She gave me the death potion for the deepest pain, for supreme suffering. Let death now thank her!

At first Tristan resists coming to Isolde, but as the ship nears the harbor, he at last enters her cabin. The scene is tense with irony. Tristan sings, “now I take the cup / so that, today, I may fully recuperate,” recuperation another way of saying annihilation. “I drink you,” he sings, “kindly potion of forgetting.” The two drink together, not knowing that Brangäne has switched one potion for another. Whatever bitterness they taste in the draught they imagine is the flavor of poison and not that of eternal love. We’re genetically designed to taste the bitter; it’s how our mouths protect us against toxins in nature. This is why poisons are so often mixed into wine or other rich flavors: to conceal the jeopardy that our tongues would otherwise discern. When they drink from the chalice, the bitterness Tristan and Isolde taste is not that of apple seeds or the pits of cherries, not spoonfuls of nutmeg, not the fish that inflates itself like a lethal balloon, not the mushrooms known as destroying angels, death caps, deadly dapperlings.

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What they taste isn’t poison. And yet it is, the love potion ultimately leading to their deaths. After the magic does its work, the two are finally able to sing what they have refused to voice. “Tristan!” “Isolde!” they cry out to one another in terrible ecstasy. Isolde calls Tristan her “disloyal beloved,” one of many such contradictions in the opera, because this is a union full of disunity, a pleasure brimming with pain, an accord defined by discordance. The rest of the opera, Magee writes, dramatizes the thinking of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who “regarded himself as correcting and completing the philosophy of Kant” while also connecting to the arguments made by Hinduism and Buddhism. Schopenhauer’s multivolume undertaking, The World as Will and Representation, explores epistemology, ontology, aesthetics, and ethics. As Magee underscores, Wagner was “thoroughly familiar” with Schopenhauer’s ideas, having “read and reread the whole” of The World as Will and Representation, absorbing the text “in the fullest detail, with its supporting arguments and subsidiary themes.” Indeed, the opera is dense with images of night and day, darkness and light that reflect “Schopenhauerian assumptions” about our inability to bridge the physical and the metaphysical: So when the lovers are ranting against the awfulness of day and of daylight, they are ranting against the world, with its false values; and at the same time they are ranting against what separates them metaphysically as well as physically. So long as they are alive in this world they will be individually separate, kept apart not only by social forces but, at an

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Their suffering comes from being divided, both as two distinct bodies kept apart in a landscape of immediate experience and as two spirits that can never be joined as long as they are tethered to the physical, sensory world. When Tristan and Isolde seek death in the potion, they are given undying love instead. In the love potion, they expect to find union but are only offered increasingly hazardous moments of almost-congress. A death potion that animates the lovers with desire, a love potion that kills—this too is Schopenhauerian. Magee writes that “in Act III of Tristan, Tristan’s longing for Isolde is literally killing him, and yet is at the same time the only thing keeping him alive.” The tenor sings, “Now can no healing, / no sweet death, / ever free me / from the pain of longing.” Held between two yearnings—to die and to reunite with Isolde—Tristan is like the chord that will not resolve. And the famous Tristan chord itself is like the two potions, death and desire intermingled, promising the end of corporeal and spiritual anguish while refusing to deliver on that promise. Just as the lovers cannot achieve a resolution to their own wants, so the audience is left wanting and waiting for musical resolution. Even as an adult, I can barely understand the ostentatious, full-throated feelings of these two mythical figures. My own longings aren’t large enough to reach the far seats of an opera house. My emotions would be inaudible if sung over the flutes and violins, the trumpets and timpani. But, when I listen to the opening bars of the prelude of Tristan

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und Isolde, the soft gasp of an F, B, DƎ, and GƎ, that mark the opera’s sustained resistance to closure, I give in to the wrenching, lovely bitterness of the sound. Sharp. Absinthian. Amaroidal. I can’t help drinking it in.

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THE TINY THREAD OF MILK Today, I’m trying to find an old photograph of my mother. She’s smiling at the camera, a blanketed weight in her arms. She is just about to finish feeding me, about to button her shirt again, to dab a drop of milk from my lips. In my memory, the snapshot is cast in the golden light of late afternoon. It has the shine of archetype, like a classical image of the Madonna with her child. And because I can’t find the photo album to confirm what I remember— I’m sure Mommy glowed with joy, that she was radiant in the picture—I search the Internet instead for representations of mothers and babies. I want to see how the old painters depicted this most mundane of actions, Mary feeding her holy son, a sliver of breast visible to the viewer. I want to find paintings that show us these famous bodies— divine and biblical— as human, the Madonna tired as any new mother might be after nights of tiny

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wailing, interrupted sleep, and Jesus, his little fist clenched in hunger. Mostly, I find paintings in which the figures face the viewer, as if posed for a portrait taken in some photographer’s studio at the mall. The child is often placed on his mother’s lap, one hand grasping the neck of Mary’s red dress. Sometimes they both wear gold halos. Sometimes they sit in darkness or before a delicate landscape, the slight slope of a hillside behind them. Often the artists seem most interested in depicting the luxurious folds of fabric, her cloak, the baby’s swaddling. I could look at these elegant images for hours and not understand what it meant for Mary to feed her child, how she must have felt both the deep maternal pull when the baby latched to her breast, the small contractions in her uterus, and felt something else as well, the knowledge that this son would never be entirely hers, that already he belonged to the glimmering light of prophecy. Somewhere on the Internet, I find a painting known as the Madonna Litta, circa 1490 and attributed to Leonard da Vinci. Mary’s face is a porcelain luminescence. She looks down at the baby in her arms, who in turn stares out, almost toward the viewer, his eyelids beginning to droop, just as an ordinary baby will so often fall asleep mid-meal, lips still pressed to his mother’s skin. I am comforted to imagine that even the newborn messiah requires nourishment beyond the grace of God; the infant Jesus is dependent on someone mortal, not yet made strange and terrifying by his role as savior. Just after his birth, he too needs breast milk rich in the colostrum that helps the young body fight off infection. He too needs the milk that comes later, thinner

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stuff full of necessary fats and nutrients. And he needs the milk known as “mature,” antibacterial and alive with white blood cells. My favorite detail in the Madonna Litta is a dotted line of blue thread pulled open near the top of her gown. In the modern idiom, we might say Mary wears a nursingfriendly garment, the thread meant to be loosened whenever it is time to feed her son. This too comforts me. Even Mary must occasionally worry about a small stain of milk spreading across her bodice. Perhaps, just beyond the frame of the canvas, there’s a crumpled piece of cloth she uses to wipe the liquid from her baby’s chin. For a more secular portrait, I turn to Mary Cassatt’s Young Mother Nursing Her Child, dated 1906. The two figures are joined, not only nipple to mouth, but also connected in the way the baby reaches its fingers to touch the mother’s lips, the mother cradling the child, one arm circling the infant’s back, the other hand cushioned around a tiny foot. Most of all, their gazes hold each other. When I stare at the painting, my eyes move from her line of sight down to the baby, then I follow the rounded form of the small body to the plump toes, and then to the mother’s hand and up the curve of her arm to her neck, the arch of her hair, a dark chignon, and at last along her head and to her eyelashes. It’s a tight loop of looking. All begins and ends with the mother and child. Nothing exists or is needed beyond what she gives and what the infant receives. Even the colors of their two figures join them, her gown in shades of pink that echo the blush on the infant’s face, the tender soles, the dimpled elbow.

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Cassatt’s subject doesn’t seem that dissimilar from the Madonna Litta. Both mothers hold extremely still. The mouths of the two infants purse and relax in the same quiet rhythm. The two scenes are equally consecrated, equally commonplace. In his essay, “Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird,” Donald Hall writes about what he calls the “psychic origins of poetic form.” There are three essential delights of poetry, he argues, which appeal respectively to the senses of touch, taste, and sound. The second of those, Milktongue, is the “mouth-pleasure” of poetry, that poems are delicious to speak, the vowels and consonants delectable in their utterance. “[The baby’s] small tongue curls around the sounds,” writes Hall, “the way her tongue cherishes the tiny thread of milk she pulls from her mother. This is Milktongue.” Maybe these paintings provide a similar kind of pleasure. They are Milktongue for the eyes. When I look at them, I am fed by the feeding of the babies. My own body briefly remembers what it cannot, a time before I tasted language or knew the parts of speech, in my earliest days of naps and waking at midnight and a belly full of milk.

A FOUL CACOPHONY I entered this world early because of spoiled cheese. In Vicenza, the city of my birth, my mother ate a crumbling chunk of bad gorgonzola and went into labor ten days early. Once, in Paris, I had a meal comprised entirely of cheeses made from goat’s milk. At the end of my wedding day, a few minutes before midnight, I tasted a grilled

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cheese sandwich; I can still summon the flavors of that first bite, the thick graininess of the melting gruyere, the hot butter, the brioche eggy and sweet. In my family, we have cheeses we adore for the places they take us. Taleggio. Raclette. A creamy white chèvre with a line of ash through its center. I love cheese because it is a shapeshifter, its surface hard as stone or soft, giving way beneath the knife. I love its many colors, the scale of it, sometimes diminutive, sometimes enormous as a flattened planet. It can be sweet or bitter. It can have almost no scent at all. It can fill every corner of the kitchen with the tang of damp armpit. As cheesemaker Mateo Kehler and scientist Catherine Donnelly write in The Oxford Companion to Cheese: Cheese is a paradox, a remarkably complex food that begins as one simple and humble ingredient: milk. When coupled with equally simple ingredients—bacteria, salt, enzymes— and manipulated under the right temperatures and conditions, a transformation occurs, resulting in a vast array of products of differing shapes, sizes, and colors, with a panoply of flavors, tastes, and textures.

The pleasure of cheese is simple too. Spread it on a piece of bread. Place a sliver beneath a layer of quince paste. Grate a snowfall of pale flakes over a bowl of hot pasta. What tastes better than this? And while cheese has modest beginnings, it seems to inspire ostentatious feelings in those who love it. Food scholar Paul Kindstedt writes: “There is also a larger story, a grand narrative that binds all cheese together into a

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single history, that started with the discovery of cheese making, and that is still unfolding.” Imagine a unified theory of cheese, a universe that begins and ends with heat and acid, with rennet, with curd and whey. It sounds silly. But anyone who has ever asked the local cheesemonger, what should I buy, will be told to taste this and this and also this, the response operatic in its abundance. There will be long answers about the champion goats on a nearby farm. There will be words like innovation and tradition. There will be advice about the appropriate pairings, which honey and, of course, which wine. My favorite literary scene about cheese appears in Émile Zola’s The Belly of Paris, a novel piled high with food. The section is known as “the cheese symphony” because the novelist uses the literary device of synesthesia, calling upon the sense of sound to evoke the cacophonous aromas of the cheese stand. Over several pages, Zola describes dozens of cheeses on display in a market, their smells overlapping and competing with one another in a grand concerto of stink. The symphony contains an abundance of metaphor, nearly every cheese compared to something else: “The roqueforts, too, under their glass covers, had a princely air, their fat faces veined in blue and yellow, like the victims of some shameful disease common to rich people who have eaten too many truffles.” The cheeses are personified. They become characters, as lively as any Parisian. Many of Zola’s descriptions are grotesque or outrageous, “a gigantic cantal . . . as though split by blows from an axe,” “some Dutch cheeses suggesting decapitated heads smeared in dried blood,” and “the olivets . . . like the carcasses of

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animals which peasants cover with branches as they lie rotting in the hedgerow under the blazing sun.” It’s as if cheese demands this kind of baroque treatment. One can love cheese or hate it. But indifference? No. Standing among this disharmony of cheese is a small group of women. As they gossip, the cheeses seem to magnify the conversation. “Then the wind changed, and suddenly the deathly presence of the limbourg struck the three women, pungent and bitter, like the last gasps of a dying man.” The cheeses form their own drama, but they also act as an odiferous mirror, reflecting the women’s talk of scandal. Even a reader who loves cheese may find Zola’s descriptions revolting. In fact, the novelist wants this response. He writes that “the mould on the rinds was melting and glazing over with the rich colours of red and copper verdigris, like wounds that have badly healed.” He describes “a géromé flavoured with aniseed,” the cheese producing “such a pestilential smell that all around it flies had dropped dead on the marble slab.” The smells of disgust are everywhere in the cheese symphony: They all seemed to stink together, in a foul cacophony; from the oppressiveness of the Dutch cheeses and the gruyères to the sharp alkaline note of the olivet. From the cantal, Cheshire, and goat’s milk came the sound of the bassoon, punctuated by the sudden, sharp notes of the neufchâtels, the troyes, and the mont- d’ors. Then the smells went wild and became completely jumbled, the port-salut, limbourg, géromé, marolles, livarot, and pont- l’évèque combining into a great explosion of smells. The stench rose and spread, no

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When it comes to cheese, the revolting is never far from the delicious. As neuroscientist Rachel Herz says, “controlled rot tastes good.” And that is what cheese is: something decayed to just the right stage of pungency. When I open the refrigerator and discover that the block of neglected blue cheese is growing new mold of its own, my hunger shifts quickly to disgust. Uncontrolled rot tastes terrible. In her book That’s Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion, Herz examines the brain chemistry of this powerful feeling, how it can arise in moments of fear or desire, the ways it can protect us. We learn disgust through “our cultural heritage,” Herz writes; what we find repulsive is often more a matter of nurture than of nature. She contrasts the love of nattō in Japan with the passion for cheese in countries like the United States. Nattō, a dish of fermented soybeans, stringy and gelatinous, is a common Japanese breakfast food, which Herz describes as smelling like “the marriage of ammonia and a tire fire.” A few years ago, I ate a small bowl of nattō. For many hours after, I tasted sweaty feet on my tongue, my mouth suffused with the flavor of unwashed feet, feet in the back of my throat, feet the only thing I could smell. As much as a good meal may bring people together, culture also teaches us which foods to view as our own and which to see as other, the dinner table one of the places where we establish “boundaries and borders.” Food is, according to Herz, “a mode of ethnic distinction.”

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For someone who was not raised to eat nattō, the problem is not its scent or its taste or the slime of its texture; rather, it has what Herz calls “zero food connotation.” Nattō may disgust an American eater because it is so unfamiliar, without referents or cognates, just as cheese may taste equally revolting to someone from Japan. Herz writes that “many Asians, however, regard all cheese—from processed American slices to Stilton—as utterly disgusting and the literal equivalent of cow excrement, which considering that it is the rotted consequence of an ungulate body fluid, is technically correct.” Food writer Sonoko Sakai, who recommends eating nattō “on toast lined with a piece of nori,” writes “I love it and eat it all the time, but I’m the first to admit that it’s an acquired taste (and smell) for most nonJapanese.” That we can acquire tastes—this speaks to the mutability of our preferences. We learn to crave the long strands of mozzarella pulling elastically from the edge of a pizza slice. We learn to love the cobwebbed glue of nattō. We acquire tastes just as we acquire knowledge: with time and patience, a belief that the pursuit can lead to something delicious. Of course, tonight when I remove the small wedge of gorgonzola dolce from its waxed paper, it is easy for me to forget there are many people who find the taste of this disgusting. I take a knife to the pale cheese, cut through its blue marbling. I slice open a roasted sweet potato so that the steam can tendril out. Then I fill the orange incision with cheese. How quickly the gorgonzola melts to transparency. My first bite is a mixture of the caramelized vegetable and milky salt, the sugar and starch, and the acidic tang that covers the intimate map of my tongue.

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FORGOTTEN IN THE GARDEN

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I have been told that tomatoes require tender attention. The seedlings need plentiful, direct light. As they begin to grow, the plants demand air and the right kind of heat. They want pruning and pinching, good drainage, enough room for the roots to spread into the dirt. They have to be propped up with stakes to prevent rot. There is never a guarantee of a good yield, and, even when a gardener is vigilant, the tomatoes may still die in a freeze overnight or the leaves may go gray with late blight. In Louise Glück’s “Vespers,” a speaker laments her own inability to harvest a crop of tomato plants and chastises God for abandoning her. The poem appears in Glück’s collection The Wild Iris, which is set in a garden where flowers, plants, and trees address their human caretakers. Occasionally, as is the case with “Vespers,” people speak as well, often to a God who has left them, their complaints taking the form of matins and vespers: prayers of morning and evening. “In your extended absence,” the poem begins, “you permit me / use of earth.” The speaker argues that she should not be entrusted to grow tomatoes. But, if she must be assigned this difficult task, then at least God should be considerate enough to hold back all the small plagues that might harm the plants. It’s only fair, she says, given that other geographies are kept warm and sunlit. God may govern the landscape, but it is the speaker who has devoted herself to the tomatoes’ survival, her heart the one that hurts when they fail to thrive. And while God discerns no difference between life and death, even divine beings

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should recognize the agony that people feel in cultivating the garden, the green successes and the mildewed disappointments. “I am responsible,” she concludes, defiantly, “for these vines.” Although the poem’s title suggests that this will be a supplication, the text functions more like a negotiation. The speaker recognizes that she is arguing with a moody divinity. Depending on the disposition of the heavens— benevolence or vengeance, generosity or meanness—the skies will clear, or they will darken. The plants will be granted life or will die. Nonetheless, despite the speaker’s powerlessness, her tone remains assertive rather than deferential. She declares. She provokes. She questions. Her defiance stands in opposition to the obvious fragility of the tomatoes. They have not survived the season, and this is the source of the speaker’s anger, that some disease has destroyed the vegetable she worked so hard to save. Anyone who has ever held a tomato knows the paradox of the fruit. The thin wall of skin is surprisingly difficult to pierce with a knife; in that first cut, we see skin resisting the blade, as if protecting itself from a wound. But once we split the tomato open, we find only softness inside, flesh that gives easily, the hollows containing half circles of gelatinous seeds, and so much juice. No wonder they are difficult to keep alive. Beyond the rigidity of the skin, the fruit’s interior pulses like a heart exposed in the chest. We can easily crush a tomato in our fist, watching it turn to pulp and mush. Indeed, the poem’s real grief is not that the tomatoes have been forgotten by God but that the speaker has. The plants’ decline is a stand-in for her own suffering. She is

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withering on the vine in a postlapsarian garden where God’s presence is an uncertain, unpredictable thing. A hothouse tomato tastes nothing like a tomato grown in a warm garden. The former has a flavor that is easy to mistake for cardboard or polystyrene foam and the latter is sweet and meaty, rich in the glutamic acid that gives food the taste we call umami. That satisfying taste comes from real exposure to the elements, from the risk of dropping temperatures or the threat of hornworms inching across the leaves, their bodies camouflaged against the furred, green stems of the plant. The only idol of the greenhouse is the thermostat. In “Vespers,” the tomatoes have failed. But how delicious they might have been! And though God has left the speaker to grow things on her own, she keeps searching for a holy presence. This is what makes the poem so poignant. Even a reader with a black thumb such as mine, even a reader like me who doesn’t long for the sound of God’s voice in the garden, can appreciate the speaker’s distress. Her hands sift the dark, crumbling earth. “I planted the seeds,” she laments, “I watched the first shoots / like wings tearing the soil,” those delicate wings like the traces of angels thrusting improbably from the ground.

THE HISTORY OF THAT GROUND Decades ago, my father drove with one of his diplomatic contacts less than an hour outside Warsaw to hunt mushrooms. It was early autumn, the light between the trees a

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soft gold. They walked a few quiet hours in the woods, the Polish friend pointing to different specimens of mushrooms along the way. This one tastes delicious sauteed in butter. That one is poisonous. It was pleasant work. The friend had been hunting mushrooms his whole life; he often knelt to dig one from the soil, and my father’s only task was to stand nearby holding a wicker basket. They weren’t looking for truffles, dark clusters of pungent flavor, but for more modest fare: kurki, what the French call chanterelles and the Germans Pfifferlinge, amber-yellow mushrooms the Poles use in heavy sauces and soups but also preserve by pickling in a bath of vinegar scented with juniper and bay leaves. Kurki were so plentiful it was common to buy them by the kilo at roadside stands for only a few złoty. In the forest, there were groupings of kurki everywhere. “It was as easy as picking a piece of fruit from a tree,” my father tells me, and in his voice I hear the distant warmth of that afternoon and a pair of footsteps moving across the leafy ground. When I think about my father’s one afternoon of mushroom hunting, my mind moves swiftly to Pan Tadeusz. This is the epic poem Adam Mickiewicz published in 1834 when he was exiled from his homeland—because of political activism on behalf of Polish independence—and living in Paris. In the introduction to his translation of Pan Tadeusz, Bill Johnston writes that Mickiewicz wrote the book during a time when “Poland was reeling from a long series of dramatic and tragic events that had effectively erased the country from the map.” For 120 years, Poland ceased to exist as a country, having been divided—partitioned as the Poles

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say—by neighboring powers, the Austrians and the Prussians and the Russians and, finally, in the twentieth century, by the Germans and Soviets. Johnston explains that, despite the poet’s exile and the uncertainty of Poland as nation-state at the time, “Mickiewicz absolutely thought of himself as a Pole; he wrote in Polish and concerned himself with Polish literature and Polish politics, including Polish independence.” Like Virgil’s The Aeneid—a book that defines what it means to be Roman, what it means to use the power of Rome to conquer other lands—Pan Tadeusz too has “nation-building goals.” But, unlike the Aeneid, in Pan Tadeusz the poet doesn’t write from a place of certainty, of knowing that his homeland will one day have distinct borders again. Instead, throughout the poem, Mickiewicz presents the reader with vivid scenes and tableaux that strive to define Polish ritual and tradition. Yes, he seems to be arguing, Poland has been erased from the map of Europe, but it abides nonetheless through language and culture. As Johnston writes, “the book captures ‘Polishness’ in a way no other work has seemed to do.” Perhaps Pan Tadeusz conveys Polishness so vividly because the text becomes an imaginary act of repatriation for the poet, returning him through verse to a landscape from which he has been barred. Of course, Mickiewicz’s goal of “nation-building” is also part of the Romantic project. Collecting folklore and fairy tales, defining national languages, and constructing epic poems that speak to a country’s unified identity—this is the sort of work that ethnographers, lexicographers, and poets undertook throughout the Romantic era. While building a nation must have felt particularly urgent for a

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dispossessed Pole like Mickiewicz, the epic poem he wrote fits well within the nationalistic concerns of continental Romanticism. It should be noted that the impulse toward creating distinct nations defined by their cultures led to the making of much beautiful art, music, and literature during the nineteenth century and to genocidal horrors in the twentieth century. One of these essential, nation-building moments in Pan Tadeusz appears in book 3. It’s a mushroom-hunting scene, which Johnston renders in loose heroic couplets that mimic Mickiwiecz’s thirteen-syllable Polish alexandrines: Mushrooms there were aplenty. The young men sought The chanterelles Lithuanians sing about— An emblem of virginity, as no worm Will eat them, nor (strangely) insect land on them. The ladies looked for the slim boletus known In song as the mushroom’s general. And one And all were hunting milk caps—less auspicious In size, less sung of, yet the most delicious, In fall or winter, fresh or in marinade . . . Some mushrooms were spurned—they languished in disfavor For being poisonous or lacking flavor, Yet they had their uses—as animal nourishment, Or insect nests, or woodland ornament. They stood like tableware in serried lines On the meadow floor: here were the round designs Or russulas in their silvers, yellows, reds, Like goblets filled with wine of different shades; Boletes, like upturned bowls amid the grasses,

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The poet’s language is as plentiful and fanciful as are the fungi themselves, thick with surprising images, funny and beautiful, embedded in this biodiverse region. The group hunts an enormous range of mushrooms, including the much sought-after Lactarius deliciosus or saffron milkcap, orange-topped and convex (perhaps to catch the rain), its gills blazing orange underneath, its stem spotted. As its name indicates, the mushroom lactates when cut, releasing a milky latex. Even the inedible varieties are carefully treated in verse, as if Mickiewicz is saying every toadstool deserves to be seen. There is an implicit message in this passage about how Poles enact their Polishness; they engage with the land by going into the woods, an ecosystem dense with organisms, the tangled roots of history. The characters in the scene wander through the forest as easily as my father’s friend once did in the leafy suburbs outside of Warsaw. They pick and choose between the palatable and the lethal, comfortable in their knowledge of which is which, because mushroom

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hunting is an indispensable part of their identities. They know mushrooms the way they know the lyrics of the “Mazurek Dąbrowskiego,” with its martial imperatives to march, march. In Mushroom: A Global History, Cynthia  D. Bertelsen writes that in some areas of Eastern Europe “mushrooms entered into the culinary repertoire because they grew abundantly in the forests and served to make the endless meatless days and religious-based fasting more palatable. Polish cooks created kotlety z grzybow, or mushroom cutlets, for Lent and other mushroom-rich dishes, such as the Polish national dish of bigos.” Indeed, bigos receives its own poetic treatment in Pan Tadeusz, Mickiewicz explaining in book 4 that the flavor of the dish is almost impossible to convey to outsiders: “How hard to tell / Its color, curious taste, and wondrous smell / In words—however much they rhyme and sound / No townsman’s belly will ever understand.” To really grasp the traditional songs and foods, Mickiewicz argues, “you want / Health, country life— and a just-ended hunt.” I can’t help wondering if Mickiewicz thought of himself as he wrote these lines. Even as he tried to express what it means to be Polish, did he worry about being too far removed from his birthplace? Did he feel exiled from his own Polishness? Mushrooms are made from the earth. They grow from the dead, from the decomposition of what was there before. To eat a mushroom is to consume the history of that ground. If we are what we eat, as the old saying goes, then perhaps we are also what we hope to eat, the foods around which we build rituals, the foods we hunt for in the forest, the ruffled fungi, the spotted and drooping ones,

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the kinds that seem to wear bell-shaped hats, the ones that stoop to the ground or nuzzle against a birch tree, the ones we dig for with our fingernails during all kinds of weather. If you’ve ever eaten mushrooms so fresh they were carried into the house still rubbed in earth, it’s hard to be satisfied with more sanitized varieties. Who wants those pale specimens sealed in small cartons, their heads pressing against the plastic wrap, crammed so close together their delicate skins bear the impression of their mushroom neighbors? At the grocery store, there are cartons labeled “button” and “baby bella,” the former white and small, the latter slightly larger and the color of milky chocolate. These will do. But they lack the scent of wet ground, the flavor of pepper or walnuts. They aren’t meaty in the mouth. The best mushrooms are nearly alive and breathing. They taste of the land in all its contested, jostling narratives.

CLEAR TO THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL Broth. Noun. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it’s a word “inherited from Germanic.” Its etymology disappoints me: “verb-root brū- to prepare by boiling, make a decoction: see brew.” I want the ancient root of the word to offer some lyric insight, that broth originated as the simmering taste of comfort or as a food that nourishes. “Compare French bouillon broth, < bouillir to boil,” commands the dictionary. In many languages, broth, it seems, has always been entirely itself, something beyond metaphor, elemental as fire or earth. Thin soup. Clear to the bottom of the bowl. Liquid flavored by vegetables or bones.

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In Vietnamese cuisine there’s pho. The soup contains rice noodles and some kind of protein, a handful of beansprouts, perhaps a wispy cluster of cilantro. But the heart of the dish is the broth. It’s almost the color of silty water and bright with the flavors of star anise, cardamom, and cloves. Pho is said to be famously difficult to prepare, best left to the professionals, although food writer Andrea Nguyen argues that “if you know how to boil water, you can master Vietnam’s national dish.” There’s that etymology again: “to prepare by boiling.” In Japanese cuisine, brothy soups such as miso begin with a stock called dashi, which is the very essence of that taste known as umami. Dashi is often made with dried bonito flakes and with kombu; pink slivers of desiccated tuna mix with chunks of thick kelp to produce something savory and a little sweet. As the stock heats to near boiling, the water is impregnated with memories of the sea. Vegetarian dashi gets its flavor from dried shitake mushrooms. It smells of fresh soil turned liquid. In Jewish cooking, there’s chicken soup. Known as Jewish penicillin, the soup shimmers like pale amber. Cookbook author Arthur Schwartz argues that, even in our modern era, “the ability to make a great pot of goldene yoichle, golden broth in Yiddish, is still the measure of a balabusta’s culinary ability.” The traditional Ashkenazi recipe calls for a whole chicken along with root vegetables like parsnips and carrots (matzoh balls are optional). The dish has evolved in contemporary kitchens. Now the cook goes to the grocery store to buy a plump chicken sealed in plastic wrap. But, as Schwartz explains, “years ago, it was only an old bird that was used for the broth. In the Old Country,

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as in many poor cultures, you didn’t kill the hen that gave you eggs, an important protein source. Only when the old girl began laying few eggs, or not laying at all, did she become a candidate for the soup pot.” In the New World of plenty, Jewish chicken soup hasn’t lost its almost mythical reputation as a remedy for ailments of the body and soul. Whenever I’m sick with a cold, my mother still phones me to say, “I should bring over some chicken soup. Why don’t I bring you some? Yes, yes, I’ll be over in a few minutes.” At my local health food store, I can buy costly bottles and cartons of what’s known as bone broth. Like Jewish chicken soup, it is thought to be restorative. Made, as the name implies, from slow-simmering bones and other leftover parts of the animal, it is rich in collagen. Bone broth is said to fight inflammation, make skin dewy, heal joints and tissue, and even lead to a better night’s sleep. And how does it taste? Dense. Meaty and satisfying on the tongue. Thick despite the fact that its consistency is thin as a consommé. I’m reminded of the European folktale of stone soup. A traveler arrives in some poor village—it could be anywhere in the world—where all the residents are hungry. No one will offer food to the stranger. From his bag, he pulls out an iron kettle and fills it with water. He places a large stone at the bottom. “What are you making?” somebody asks. “Stone soup,” he answers. “Delicious, filling fare on a night like this. I’ll be glad to share it with you, although the dish tastes even better with a carrot or a potato, perhaps a shank bone with a little meat on it.” Soon the whole village is standing around the pot. Each family drops something into the boiling water. A dusty turnip. A few ruffled leaves

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of a cabbage. There is soup enough for everyone. When the kettle is finally empty, the traveler reaches in and removes the stone. “It’s the key ingredient,” he says, holding the damp stone high in the air. “Without it, the meal lacks a little something.” Then he thanks the villagers for their generosity and walks away, his belly sloshing full of soup. All these broths— across cultures and stories—have in common that they are prepared “by boiling” to quote the OED again. They’re dishes that comfort or heal. They are the paradox of simple ingredients used to make complex flavors. The steam rising from a bowl warms my face as I lean over to sip another spoonful. The ingredients that went into making the broth have been distilled to their purest forms, the green of the celery, the onion’s sharp tears. The liquid is so unclouded that I can almost see myself reflected in its clarifying surface.

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learly You’ve Got Great Taste,” reads the email I find in my junk folder this morning. The message comes from a company that sells furniture and other household goods: linen sheets, table lamps, throw pillows. It happens so easily, so effortlessly. Every day we use the word taste to mean something beyond our preferences for certain foods. This shift from the literal to the metaphorical happens in other languages too. Goût in French. Geschmack in German. Gusto in Spanish and Italian. This metamorphosis of speech makes sense, given that every time we eat we respond positively, negatively, or neutrally to the flavors we encounter. A dish tastes good or bad to us. Occasionally, we react with indifference. Whenever we taste, we make judgments. We keep eating our Reuben sandwich—how pillowy the rye bread! how perfectly salty the corned beef! how oozing the Swiss cheese!— or else we spit the bite back onto the plate. Disgusting, we think, dabbing our lips with the napkin as if to wipe the revulsion from our mouths.

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It’s an easy leap from making judgments about our lunch to assessing other kinds of partialities and labeling all the objects we like or loathe as our tastes. We take in the world through our senses. We devour books, movies, clothes, even people. And soon we begin to judge not only our own tastes but also the tastes of others. Don’t forget my ex-boyfriend, the one who picked vanilla ice cream over chocolate. I deemed his taste in frozen desserts to be bad— or, if not bad, then dull. Therefore, I concluded, his taste in art or theater might be equally insipid, not to mention his taste in cities, in how to spend a Saturday morning, in what to believe about death. I was certain his taste in ice cream told me everything I needed to know about the man. We want our tastes to align with those we love. After more than fifteen years of marriage, I still ask my husband in astonishment, “What! You don’t like mushrooms on your pizza?” as if I am hearing this information for the first time. In the same way, my husband continues to hope I will come to share his love of motorcycles, that I will agree there is no greater happiness than the rumble of two tires against the road, the oily breath of exhaust, and the hard splat of bugs striking a helmet. “Throughout history,” writes Diane Ackerman, “and in many cultures, taste has always had a double meaning. The words come from the Middle English tasten, to examine by touch, test, or sample, and continues back to the Latin taxare, to touch sharply. So a taste was always a trial or test.” Perhaps, my husband fails my test. But I fail his as well. When it comes to certain pleasures, our tastes will always diverge. And this is what makes marriage such a difficult, interesting

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recipe: that it’s possible to love one another despite our differences over mushrooms and motorcycles. “What is food to one, is to others bitter poison,” Lucretius famously wrote in On the Nature of Things. We declare that one man’s trash is another’s man treasure. We throw up our hands in exasperation, sighing, there’s no accounting for taste. À chacun son gout, say the French. In “Of the Standard of Taste,” philosopher David Hume posits that some works of literature, for instance, are better than others. But only one who is a “true judge”— a critic with an agile, unbiased mind, well-practiced in engaging with and comparing works of art— can separate objectively the superior from the inferior. Such a person would have a “rare character,” acknowledges Hume, and would be difficult to find, difficult even to distinguish “from pretenders.” Ultimately, Hume arrives at a problem: Comedy, tragedy, satire, odes, have each its partisans, who prefer that particular species of writing to all others. It is plainly an error in a critic, to confine his approbation to one species or style of writing, and condemn all the rest. But it is almost impossible not to feel a predilection for that which suits our particular turn and disposition. Such preferences are innocent and unavoidable, and can never reasonably be the object of dispute, because there is no standard by which they can be decided.

So, there is no agreed-upon standard, and even the “true judge” may be susceptible to predilections. In other words, our tastes are personal and our own; they are the opposite of universal.

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Writing about the philosophers of the eighteenth century, scholar David  M. Kaplan observes that these great minds saw taste as a conundrum: If we each have our own preferences and tastes, then there is no way to determine if something really is beautiful or if it just appears that way to someone. The very notion of taste seems to lead to aesthetic relativism, where judgments are based on nothing but pleasurable feelings. Yet we make aesthetic judgements all the time, and they do not seem arbitrary. We believe there really is a difference between good and bad food, or a great and forgettable movie.

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It’s true. We make these decisions every day: what to eat for breakfast, which shirt to wear, what song to listen to. Our choices don’t feel random but, rather, right, an expression of who we are. We are the wedge of toast dipped in the sunny yolk of a fried egg. We are the Oxford cloth buttondown. We are “Hey Jude” or “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste that our preferences are determined by the social class in which we are raised and that the culture we consume also serves to solidify further our position within a social group. In one of the book’s many charts, Bourdieu illustrates the distribution of preferences for three pieces of music according to “class fraction.” The Well-Tempered Clavier is favored by “higher- education teachers” and “art producers,” while Rhapsody in Blue is preferred by “technicians.” Finally,

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“manual workers” and “clerical and commercial employees” like The Blue Danube most of all. Our tastes can trap us, restrict us from moving outside the sphere to which we were born. We either love the cerebral fugues of Bach, the syncopated rhythms of Gershwin, or the reassuring, triplemeters of Strauss’s waltzes. The predilection for a particular musical work becomes a form of destiny, an indicator of our cultural capital as well as our economic and social capital too. Not only is the word taste able to transform itself to mean things beyond the realm of food, to mean discernment and distinction, but other words associated with the act of tasting are equally flexible. Taste is so much a part of our metaphor-making that it is difficult to imagine the figurative without it. An end may be called bitter. Happiness can be described as sweet. Desire is characterized as a thirst or hunger. In her delightful catalog of sense-related language, Thesaurus of the Senses, Linda Hart writes that words “such as bittersweet, spicy, sour, juicy, can describe our experiences and memories in flavorful terms. We may find some situations unpalatable or distasteful, or they leave a bad taste in our mouths, or have a peculiar aftertaste, while we find other experiences delicious or intoxicating.” As any poet will tell you, using the senses to describe an idea or emotion has a transformative effect, immediately grounding the abstraction in the physical experiences of the body. When a writer constructs an image—which is a three-dimensional picture made of language, a picture that utilizes one or several of the five senses—the reader is then transported into the text. We hear a word such as anger, and it evokes almost no response in us. It is pure

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idea, insubstantial, slighter than the steam rising from a pot of hot water. But say that the anger was bile in her throat, and suddenly we too can taste that bitterness, feel its acid burn on our tongues. There’s emerging science behind the power of figurative language. In an experimental study, researchers from Princeton University and the Free University of Berlin looked at how the brain processes “everyday metaphors” differently from how it responds to “literal language.” What they found is that sentences containing taste metaphors “activated areas known to be associated with emotional processing, such as the amygdala, as well as the areas known as the gustatory cortices that allow for the physical act of tasting.” When we hear such metaphors, we experience both an emotional and a physical response, much as when we sit down at a table in our favorite restaurant. Our stomachs grumble appreciatively, our mouths water in anticipation, but we also feel joy at what’s to come: we’re about to order some fried potatoes dipped in Romesco sauce, a salad of sliced apples and Manchego, a plate of boiled octopus, each tentacle sliced into nubby rounds and sprinkled with a red powdering of smoked paprika. Throughout the year of writing this book, I’ve often thought about Li-Young Lee’s “From Blossoms,” which describes the ordinary experience of visiting a roadside fruit stand. The poem considers the journey that freshpicked peaches take. They begin as blossoms on the tree, develop into fruit, ripening, and are then picked by human hands, stored in the “sweet fellowship” of wooden crates and bins, before finally being placed in paper bags for passersby to purchase. Always the peaches carry a trace of

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the soil that birthed them. “O, to take what we love inside,” the speaker exclaims, “to carry within us an orchard, to eat / not only the skin, but the shade, / not only the sugar, but the days, to hold / the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into / the round jubilance of peach.” It’s a poem about the intersection of pleasure and mortality. And because the text is written in first-person plural, it includes us all. We bite into the peach flesh. We lick the juices sticky on our fingers. But we also consume “the shade” and “the dusty skins” of the fruit. “Dust we eat,” says the speaker, the echo of the Book of Common Prayer— ashes to ashes, dust to dust—audible in the poem. In tasting the fruit, we ingest its whole lifespan, including its rebirth, the pit thrown from the open window of a moving car, perhaps landing in the grass, cracking in its fall so that it germinates, the first small roots eventually reaching into the soil. “From Blossoms” argues, however, that the peach continues inside us too. In tasting, we “take what we love inside,” both the delights and shadows of being alive, the sugar and the dust. Writer Sam Anderson asserts in “Flavors of Space-Time” that it is “hard to talk about flavor. Tasting something is such a direct neural jolt; words will always seem clumsy and vague.” In response to the difficulty of communicating the taste of foods and drinks, he says, “we turn to metaphor. Elderflower kombucha is a bottled Scandinavian summer: mild, light, yellow, easy. Coconut water is a Caribbean afternoon. Chianti, as any sommelier will tell you, is the blood of a mortally wounded Vespa. Sprite is a liquid hashtag.” That has been the challenge of this book: to get around the ungainliness of words by finding metaphors for

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taste in paintings and poems, in myths and fairy tales, in pieces of music. Anderson goes on to say, “We all have particular flavors of space-time that touch us especially deeply. To me, a warm gummy bear is the congealed essence of a 1980s school bus ride.” Here’s Proust’s madeleine again, no longer a small cake that looks like a seashell but a gelatinous bear, its miniature body warm and gooey in a little boy’s hand. I have told you about some of my most important flavors of space-time, such as the spoonful of strawberry jam my mother gave me when I had a childhood fever, the sugared fruit she used to disguise the bitterness of crushed-up medicine. When I swallowed the preserves mixed with Acetaminophen, the two flavors tasted of coughing and my mother sitting beside my bed for hours. They tasted of the essential oils my mother dabbed on a tissue and placed inside the pillowcase, so that my sleep was scented with tendrils of clove and juniper, eucalyptus and peppermint. The strawberry jam and Acetaminophen tasted, too, of a cool washcloth on my forehead. They tasted of being five years old, of childhood, the sweetness and the fear of being so small. You’ve heard a few of my stories. Maybe you can tell me about some of the flavors of space-time you cherish most of all. We could sip another cup of espresso or a small glass of port. Let’s sit together. Let’s talk a little longer.

Acknowledgments

On the Seawall—“The Tiny Thread of Milk” New England Review—“Small Cups of Shadow” Poetry Northwest—“Such Hints of Honey” and “Sweetest Things Turned Sourest”

Many thanks to Costica Bradatan and Wendy Lochner for their encouragement and support throughout the process of writing this book. Thank you also to Jeff Doty, David M. Kaplan, Patrick Madden, Yerra Sugarman, Ira Sukrungruang, Jacqueline Vanhoutte, and Robert Vivian. A special thanks to my father, Stephen Dubrow, for his translations of passages from Tristan und Isolde. And, finally, my gratitude to the many tastes of this world, for the lessons and pleasures they offer.

Works Cited

Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of the Senses. Vintage, 1990. Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Als, Hilton. “The Sugar Sphinx.” New Yorker, 8 May  2014. www.newyorker .com/culture/culture-desk/the-sugar-sphinx. Alter, Robert. The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary. Norton, 2004. Anderson, Sam. “Flavors of Space-Time.” In The Best American Food Writing 2019. Ed. Samin Nosrat and Silvia Killingsworth. Mariner, 2019. “Artist Kara Walker Draws Us Into Bitter History with Something Sweet.” All Things Considered. NPR, 16 May 2014. www.npr.org/2014/05/16/313017716 /artist-kara-walker-draws-us-into-bitter-history-with-something-sweet. d’Aulaire, Edgar Parin, and Ingri d’Aulaire. D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. Delacorte Books for Young Readers, 1992. Bartlett, John. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Ed. Geoffrey O’Brien. Little, Brown, 2012. Bender, Aimee. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. Anchor, 2010. Bertelsen, Cynthia D. Mushroom: A Global History. Reaktion, 2013. Boland, Eavan. In a Time of Violence. Norton, 1994. Booth, Stephen. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Yale University Press, 1977.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Harvard University Press, 1984. Brennan, Georgeanne. Olives, Anchovies, and Capers: The Secret Ingredients of the Mediterranean Table. Chronicle, 2001. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Ed. Ivor H. Evans. Harper and Row, 1981. Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme. The Physiology of Taste. Ed. and trans. M. F. K. Fisher. Vintage, 1949. Brown, Rebecca. The Gifts of the Body. HarperCollins, 1994. Celan, Paul. Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. Trans. John Felstiner. Norton, 2001. Chekhov, Anton. Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories. Ed. Cathy Popkin. Norton, 2014. Christensen, Kate. Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites. Anchor, 2013. Christle, Heather. The Crying Book. Catapult, 2019. Clifton, Lucille. good woman: poems and a memoir, 1969–1980. BOA, 1980. Coe, Sophie D., and Michael D. Coe. The True History of Chocolate. Thames and Hudson, 1996. Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin. Belknap, 1998. Doty, Mark. Source. HarperCollins, 2002. ——. Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy. Beacon, 2001. Dunn, Rob, and Monica Sanchez. Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human. Princeton University Press, 2021. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. Vintage, 1995. Esquivel, Laura. Like Water for Chocolate. Trans. Carol Christensen and Thomas Christensen. Anchor, 1995. Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. Yale University Press, 1995. Fisher, M. F. K. An Alphabet for Gourmets. North Point, 1989. Glück, Louis. Wild Iris. Ecco, 1993. Gopnik, Adam. “An American Painter.“ Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective. Ed. Steven A. Nash. Thames and Hudson: 2000. Grass, Günter. The Tin Drum. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Vintage, 1990. Greenblatt, Stephen. The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: The Story That Created Us. Norton, 2017.

WORKS CITED Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhem Grimm. The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition. Trans. Jack Zipes. Princeton University Press, 2014. Hall, Donald. Breakfast Served Any Time All Day. University of Michigan Press, 2003. Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. Little, Brown, 1942. Harjo, Joy. The Woman Who Fell from the Sky. Norton, 1996. Harris, Jessica B. High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America. Bloomsbury, 2012. Harris, Joanne. Chocolat: A Novel. Penguin, 2000. Hart, Linda. Thesaurus of the Senses. Four Cats, 2015. Herz, Rachel. That’s Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion. Norton, 2012. The Holy Qur’an. Ali, Abdullah Yusef. Wordsworth, 2001. Homer. Homeric Hyms. Trans. Jules Cashford. Penguin Classics, 2003. Hume, David. David Hume: Selected Essays. Ed. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar. Oxford World Classics, 1996. Jukes, Helen. A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings: A Year of Keeping Bees. Pantheon, 2020. Kaplan, David  M. Food Philosophy: An Introduction. Columbia University Press, 2020. Kehler, Mateo, and Catherine Donnelly. The Oxford Companion to Cheese. Oxford University Press, 2016. Kelly, Morgan. “Neural Sweet Talk: Taste Metaphors Emotionally Engage the Brain.” Princeton University, July  2021. www.princeton.edu/news/2014 /06/25/neural-sweet-talk-taste-metaphors-emotionally-engage-brain. Kindstedt, Paul. Cheese and Culture: A History of Cheese and Its Place in Western Civilization. Chelsea Green, 2012. Kushner, Tony. Angels in America. Theatre Communications, 2003. Laing, Olivia. The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone. Picador, 2016. Lee, Li-Young. Rose. BOA, 1986. Liedtke, Walter. Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vols. 1–2. Yale University Press, 2007. ——. “Still-Life Painting in Northern Europe, 1600–1800.” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/nstl/hd_nstl.htm.

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Magee, Bryan. The Tristan Chord. H. B. Fenn, 2000. Mickiewicz, Adam. Pan Tadeusz: The Last Foray in Lithuania. Trans. Bill Johnston. Archipelago, 2018. Miller, Adrian. Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time. University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Milne, A. A. The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh. Dutton Books for Young Readers, 1996. Milton, John. The Complete Poetry of John Milton. Anchor. 1971. Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Penguin, 1986. Mouritsen, Ole G., and Klavs Styrbæck. Umami: Unlocking the Secrets of the Fifth Taste. Trans. Mariela Johanson. Columbia University Press, 2016. Nguyen, Andrea. The Pho Cookbook: Easy to Adventurous Recipes for Vietnam’s Favorite Soup and Noodles. Ten Speed, 2017. Okakura Kakuzō. The Book of Tea: Beauty, Simplicity and the Zen Aesthetic. Tuttle, 2018. “Okakura Tea Set.” Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. www.gardnermuseum .org/experience/collection/13432. Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past, vol.  1. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff. Penguin, 1981. Rosenblum, Mort. Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light. North Point, 2005. ——. Olives: The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit. North Point, 1998. Ruefle, Mary. Madness, Rack, and Honey. Wave, 2012. Rumi, Jalal al-Din. The Essential Rumi, New Expanded Edition. Trans. Coleman Barks and John Moyne. HarperOne, 2004. Sakai, Sonoko, and Rick Poon. Japanese Home Cooking: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavors. Roost, 2019. Schwartz, Arthur. Arthur Schwartz’s Jewish Home Cooking: Yiddish Recipes Revisited. Ten Speed, 2008. Sharma, Nik. The Flavor Equation: The Science of Great Cooking Explained in More Than 100 Essential Recipes. Chronicle, 2020. Sichel, Jennifer. “ ‘What Is Pop Art?’ A Revised Transcript of Gene Swenson’s 1963 Interview with Andy Warhol.” Oxford Art Journal 41, no.  1 (March 2018). doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcy001. Stallings, A. E. “Olives.” TriQuarterly, 2012.

WORKS CITED Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford University Press, 1998. Strand, Mark. Hopper. Ecco, 1994. van Gogh, Vincent. “To Theo van Gogh. Arles, Tuesday, 22 January  1889.” Vincent van Gogh: The Letters. www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let741 /letter.html. Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Belknap, 1999. Vingerhoets, Ad. Why Only Humans Weep: Unravelling the Mysteries of Tears. Oxford University Press, 2013. Walvin, James. Sugar: The World Corrupted, from Slavery to Obesity. Pegasus, 2018. Zola, Émile. The Belly of Paris. Trans. Brian Nelson. Oxford University Press, 2009.

135

Index

Ackerman, Diane, 5, 122 Adam and Eve, 14– 17 Adorno, Theodor W., 91– 92 The Aeneid (Virgil), 112 African Americans, 86 AIDS, 65 An Alphabet for Gourmets (Fisher), 11 Als, Hilton, 33–34 Alter, Robert, 14 amygdalae, 90, 126 Anderson, Sam, 127– 128 aroma. See smells/aromas “At the Gym” poem (Doty), 65 Aztecs, 81, 83 The Belly of Paris novel (Zola), 104– 106 Bender, Aimee, 10 Bertelsen, Cynthia D., 115 bitter flavor (bitterness), 73– 98; Adam and Eve story and, 14; of

chocolate, 15– 16, 84; in “Count Up the Almonds” (Celan), 90– 93; in “cutting greens” (Clifton), 87– 89; emotions related to, 125– 126; greens/ cooked greens and, 86– 89; in mānuka tree honey, 23; message to the body by, 7– 8; salt’s effect on, 67; taste receptors, 4, 7, 92; in Tristan und Isolde (Wagner), 93– 98; of uncured olives, 69– 70, 71 Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites (Christensen), 6 Boland, Eavan, 46 The Book of Tea (Kakuzō), 73– 76 Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 74 Bourdieu, Pierre, 2, 124– 125 Brennan, Georgeanne, 69– 70 Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 67

INDEX Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme, 3, 9– 10 broths: bone broth, 118; chicken soup/Jewish penicillin, 117– 118; dashi, 8– 9, 117; definitions, 116; French bouillon, 116; Japanese miso soup, 117; stone soup, 118– 119; Vietnamese pho, 117 Buddhism, 96

138

cacao beverages, 85– 86 Campbell’s Soup Cans (Warhol), 67– 69 candy: Hansel and Gretel and, 31; ingredients of, 40; memory association, 21–22, 43; related emotions, 44; representation in A Subtlety, 34; sour taste and, 39–40, 44 Celan, Paul, 90– 92 Cézanne, Paul, 31–32, 36 cheese: aperitif and, 12; Donnelly/ Kehler, description of, 103; feelings inspired by, 103– 104; Herz’s description of, 106; Kindstedt’s narrative on, 103– 104; mention in Warhol’s interview, 68; with olives on bread, 69; umami and, 102– 107; varied flavors/scents of, 102– 103; Zola’s descriptions of, 104– 106 chewing, 5, 6, 25, 44 children: Adam and Eve story and, 16; family meals and, 10; food discoveries by, 21–22; in Hansel

and Gretel fairy tale, 28–30; in “The Pomegranate” (Boland), 46; in A Subtlety (Walker), 33–34; taste associations of, 22 chocolate: Aztecs and, 81, 83; “bitter elixir of life” description, 83– 84; cacao beverages, 85– 86; chemical components, 85; chocolate syrup, 80; in Chocolat (Harris), 83– 85; complexities of taste of, 15– 16; in Like Water for Chocolate (Esquivel), 82– 83, 85; Maya and, 81, 85– 86; pleasures in reading about, 85; preference for/dislike of, 1–2; relation of look to taste, 84; Rosenblum’s book about, 81; transformations of, 84; in The True History of Chocolate (Coe and Coe), 81, 84– 85 Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light (Rosenblum), 81 Chocolat (Harris), 83– 85 Christensen, Kate, 6 Christle, Heather, 60 Clifton, Lucille, 87– 89 Coe, Michael, 81, 84– 85 Coe, Sophie, 81, 84– 85 coffee: bitterness of, 79; in Nighthawk’s painting (Hopper), 77– 80; profiles of coffee drinkers, 79– 80; sweetness of sugar in, 35–36 “Count Up the Almonds” poem (Celan), 90– 93 crying: at celebrations/when grieving, 59; by infants, 59;

INDEX by moirologists at funerals, 60– 61; onions and, 59– 62; in “Perhaps the World Ends Here” (Harjo), 10– 11; saltiness of tears, 59, 61; in The Tin Drum (Grass), 60– 62; Vingerhoets’ study of, 61 The Crying Book (Christle), 60 “cutting greens” poem (Clifton), 87– 89 dashi broth, 8– 9, 117 D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, 44–45 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 67, 100– 102 de Heem, Jan Davidszoon, 53– 55 Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human (Dunn and Sanchez), 6– 7 Dickinson, Emily, 26–27 Domino Sugar Factory (Brooklyn, N.Y.), 32 Doty, Mark: “At the Gym,” 65; Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, 54– 55 Dunn, Rob, 6– 7, 10 eating together (communal meals), 10– 11 Ellison, Ralph, 20–21 emotions: conveyance of, in poetry, 24, 125– 126; crying and, 61; influence on memory, 90; kitchen table and, 11; in Like Water for Chocolate (Garza), 82; processing of, by

the amygdala, 90, 126; role in tasting, 6, 10– 11; sour candy association, 44 Esquivel, Laura, 82 Felstiner, John, 90– 91 Fisher, M. F. K., 11 The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (Alter), 13 The Flavor Equation: The Science of Great Cooking Explained in More Than 100 Essential Recipes (Sharma), 4 flavors. See individual flavors “Flavors of Space-Time” (Anderson), 127– 128 food: age-related decisions about, 3; artistic representations of, 55– 56; children’s discovery of favorites, 21; cooked greens as soul food, 86– 87; curing of, 70– 71; food labels, 31; physiology of tasting, 4– 5, 7, 10; preparation/preservation methods, 6; subjective engagement with, 2; See also individual flavors; individual foods Food Philosophy: An Introduction (Kaplan), 2 “From Blossoms” poem (Lee), 126– 127 Garden of Eden, 15– 16 Gardner, Isabella Stewart, 74– 75

139

INDEX

140

genocide, 27, 60, 92– 93 The Gifts of the Body (Brown), 66 Glück, Louise, 108– 110 glutamates/glutamic acid, 8– 9, 110 “Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird” essay (Hall), 102 “Gooseberries” short story (Chekhov), 50– 53 gooseberry fruit, 50– 53 Gopnik, Adam, 32 Grass, Günter, 59– 60 Greenblatt, Stephen, 15– 17 green vegetables: cooked greens, 86– 87; “cutting greens” poem (Clifton), 87– 89 Hall, Donald, 102 Hamilton, Edith, 47–48 “Hansel and Gretel” fairy tale (Brothers Grimm), 28–31 Hänsel und Gretel opera, 29–30 Harjo, Joy, 10– 11 Harris, Jessica B., 87 Harris, Joanne, 83– 85 Hart, Linda, 125 Herz, Rachel, 106– 107 Hinduism, 96 HIV, 63– 65 Holland, Elizabeth, 26–27 Holocaust, 91 The Homeric Hymns, 45–46, 50 honey, 23–27; Dickinson’s poem about, 26–27; The Iliad/Achilles on, 26; Jukes on, 25–26; Ruefle

on, 23–24, 27; Winnie-the-Pooh’s love of, 23 A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings: A Year of Keeping Bees (Jukes), 24–26 Hopper, Edward, 78– 80 Hume, David, 123 Humperdinck, Engelbert, 29–30 Ikeda, Kikunae, 8, 10 In Search of Lost Time (Proust), 18 Invisible Man (Ellison), 20–21 Isabella Steward Gardner Museum, 74– 75 Japan: dashi broth, 8– 9, 117; miso soup, 117; Teaism in, 76, 79; umami and, 8– 9, 117 Jewish people: chicken soup/Jewish penicillin, 117– 118; pomegranates and, 49 Johnston, Bill, 111– 113 Kakuzō, Okakura: The Book of Tea, 73– 76; on Teaism, 76; tea set gift to Gardner, 75 Kaplan, David M., 2, 124 kitchen table, 10– 11, 15, 21 Kushner, Tony, 63– 65 Laing, Olivia, 80 language: studies of, 126; use of metaphors for taste, 127– 128; use of synesthesia, 104 The Last Supper (Da Vinci), 67

INDEX Lee, Li-Young, 126– 127 Liedtke, Walter, 54– 55 Like Water for Chocolate (Esquivel), 82, 85 The Lonely City (Laing), 80

nation-building, 112– 113 nattō (fermented soybeans), 106– 107 A Natural History of the Senses (Ackerman), 5

“Madness, Rack, and Honey” lecture (Ruefle), 23–24 Madonna Litta painting (da Vinci), 100– 102 Magee, Bryan, 93, 96– 97 Maya people, 81, 85– 86 memory (memories): Adam and Eve story and, 16; evocation of, from poems, 89; growing up and, 3; influence of emotions on, 90; relation of taste and, 3; role in sparking the senses, 17– 19, 21– 22 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 47 Mickiewicz, Adam, 111– 115 Miller, Adrian, 86– 87 Milton, John, 16– 17 Mintz, Sidney, 33, 35 miso soup, Japan, 117 Mouritsen, Ole G., 7– 9 MSG (monosodium glutamate), 8 Museum of Modern Art (New York City), 67– 68 Mushroom: A Global History (Bertelsen), 115 mushrooms: hunting for, 110– 111, 113– 115; in Pan Tadeusz poem (Mickiewicz), 113– 115; umami of fresh mushrooms, 115– 116

“Of the Standard of Taste” (Hume), 123 olives: bitter vs. savory duality of, 70– 71; cultural influences of, 71; Rosenblum on, 71– 72 Olives, Anchovies, and Capers: The Secret Ingredients of the Mediterranean Table (Brennan), 69– 70 “Olives” poem (Stallings), 70 onions, 59– 62 On the Nature of Things (Lucretius), 123 The Oxford Companion to Cheese (Kehler and Donnelly), 103 Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 116, 119 Pan Tadeusz poem (Mickiewicz), 113– 115 Paradise Lost (Milton), 16– 17 The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (Bender), 10 Perestroika/Angels in America (Kushner), 63– 65 “Perhaps the World Ends Here” poem (Harjo), 10– 11 Persephone, 44–48, 50 pho soup, Vietnam, 117

141

INDEX The Physiology of Taste (Brillat-Savarin), 3, 9–10 “The Pomegranate” poem (Boland), 46 pomegranates, 45– 50 Poppy and Memory (Celan), 90– 92 Proust, Marcel, 18–22, 128

142

Ratatouille (children’s animated film), 21 repulsive flavors and scents, 106 The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: The Story That Created Us (Greenblatt), 15– 17 Rosenblum, Mort, 71– 72, 81 Ruefle, Mary, 23–24, 27 Sakai, Sonoko, 107 salty flavor (saltiness), 59– 72; in “At the Gym” (Doty), 65; of chocolate, 15– 16; communal meals and, 12; of cured olives, 70– 71; Kaplan on, 2; message to the body of, 7; in “Olives” (Stallings), 70; salt, definitions, 67; sweating and, 62– 66; of tears, 59 Sanchez, Monica, 6– 7, 10 Sargent, John Singer, 74– 75 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 96 Schwartz, Arthur, 117– 118 Shakespeare, William, 40–43 Sharma, Nik, 4– 5 Shoah, 90, 92– 93

smells/aromas, 2–3; associated memories, 20–21, 84; association of sound, 104; role in taste, 5, 19–20 A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Bourdieu), 124– 125 soul food, 86– 87 sour flavor (sourness), 39– 57; communal meals and, 12; expression in Shakespeare’s sonnets, 40–43; gooseberry fruit and, 50– 53; The Homeric Hymns and, 45–46, 50; inclusion of lemons in art, 53– 57; memory related to, 15– 16; message to the body of, 7; Metamorphoses (Ovid) and, 47; pomegranates and, 45– 50; sour candies, 39; taste receptors for, 4– 5, 7 Steiner, George, 91 Still Life of Oranges and Lemons with Blue Gloves (Van Gogh), 55– 57 Still Life with a Glass and Oysters (de Heem), 53– 54 Still Life with Oysters and Lemon (Doty), 54 Styrbæck, Klavs, 7– 9 A Subtlety art installation (Walker), 32–35 sugar: abstaining from, 31–32; Cézanne’s artistic representation of, 31–32, 36; literary histories of, 33, 35–36; Mintz’s history of, 33, 35; on sour candies, 39; Thiebaud’s artistic representation

INDEX of, 32, 36–37; Walker’s artistic representation of, 32–35; Walvin’s history of, 35–36; swallowing, 4, 17– 18, 24, 70, 128 Swann’s Way (Proust), 18–20 sweating/perspiration: of chocolate, 15– 16; communal meals and, 12; conveyance of, in poems, 24; expression in Shakespeare’s sonnets, 42; gooseberry fruit and, 52– 53; The Homeric Hymns and, 45–46, 50; Kaplan on, 2; message to the body of, 7; in Perestroika/Angels in America, 63– 85; saltiness of, 64, 65; Shakespeare’s linking of sour with, 40–41; varied reasons for, 62– 63, 66; sweet flavor (sweetness), 13–38; taste receptors for, 4, 7. See also sugar Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Mintz), 33, 35 synesthesia, 104 tannins, 3, 76– 77, 86 Taoism, 76 taste buds, 4– 5, 39, 44 taste receptors: for bitter, 4, 7, 92; evolution of, 7; for salty, 4; for sour, 4– 5, 7; for sweet, 4; for umami, 4 taste/tasting: Bourdieu on, 124– 125; cultural/historical variations, 122– 123; in “From Blossoms”

(Lee), 127; Hart on, 125; Kaplan on, 124; physiology of, 126; various uses/meanings, 121– 122 tea: daily preparation practice, 73– 74; description of jasmine-scented Chinese green tea, 77; experts’ characterization of, 76– 77; in “Gooseberries” (Chekhov), 51; memory associations with, 18–20, 22; Okakura’s tea set gift to Gardner, 75; in Swann’s Way (Proust), 18–20, 22; sweetness of sugar in, 35–36. See also The Book of Tea (Kakuzō) Teaism, in Japan, 74 That’s Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion (Herz), 106 Thesaurus of the Senses (Hart), 125 Thiebaud, Wayne, 32, 36–37 The Tin Drum (Grass), 59– 60 tomatoes/tomato plants: Campbell’s Soup Cans (Warhol), 67– 68; umami flavor of garden-grown, 110; in “Vespers” poem (Glück), 108– 110 tongues: biological description of, 3–4; icing on, 1; tannins and, 76– 77. See also taste buds; taste receptors touch, role in taste, 5 Tristan und Isolde opera (Wagner), 93– 98 The True History of Chocolate (Coe and Coe), 81, 84– 85

143

INDEX

144

umami, 99– 119; of broths, 116– 119; cheese and, 102– 107; defined, 8; of fresh, earth-grown mushrooms, 115– 116; of garden-grown tomatoes, 110; glutamic acid and, 8– 9, 110; Ikeda’s identification of, 8, 10; message to the body of, 7– 8; nattō and, 106– 107; taste receptors for, 4, 7; term derivation, 8– 9, 10 Umami: Unlocking the Secrets of the Fifth Taste (Mouritsen and Styrbæck), 7– 8

Vietnam, pho soup, 117 Vingerhoets, Ad, 61

Van Gogh, Vincent, 55– 6, 55– 57 “Vespers” poem (Glück), 108– 110

Zen Buddhism, 76 Zola, Émile, 104– 106

Wagner, Richard, 93– 98 Walker, Kara, 32–35 Walvin, James, 35–36 Warhol, Andy, 67– 69 The Wild Iris (Glück), 108– 110 Winnie-the-Pooh, 23 The World as Will and Representation (Schopenhauer), 96– 97 Young Mother Nursing Her Child (Cassatt), 101– 102