In waves saturated Sydney, puffy bread takes all shapes and sizes. Whether it is Media Dragon’s perfectly salted oonie wood-fire pizza, or the billowy taboon bread with a twist from Newtown’s Konak based on an age-old recipes—it’s a fine art to make something so simple taste so unquestionably great.
Made to be pierced, popped, torn, dipped and ripped, puffy dough in Sydney is truly a rite of passage nowadays so we’ve gone and found the fluffiest, funniest and most delicious around town.
Tastes of Raki not Cognac at Konak Turkish Kitchen
Is it possible that wine connoisseurs can't tell them apart?
The secret psychology of taste, from raw oysters to tequila
How something tastes is less about the tongue than the brain, writes Tim Hayward
In 1963, Elizabeth David suffered a cerebral haemorrhage, which affected her senses of smell and taste. For a while, she was unable to taste salt, and the smell of frying onions became so strangely amplified as to be unbearable.
Since 2019, millions of people worldwide have reported loss or impairment of taste and smell as symptoms of Covid-19. David kept her symptoms secret from all but her closest friends, possibly worried about how they might affect her career if readers knew that her principal critical and creative faculties were damaged. I hope she’d receive more sympathy today, now that so many understand a little of how it feels to lose the ability to taste.
I suppose I should also regard taste and smell as the most important facets of the world I write about. Yet, in recent years, I have become increasingly fascinated by those aspects of food appreciation that have nothing to do with physical sensation.
Sure, my job usually starts with tasting food, but whether someone agrees with my assessment of a bit of cooked fish is entirely a matter of preference. In fact, we spend much of our time these days discussing food as a luxury consumer good, social experience, political statement or medium of self-expression. It’s never been truer that how something tastes is less about what takes place on the tongue than what happens inside the brain. A few years ago, I wrote about my inability to eat raw oysters. In common, it turned out, with a huge number of people,
I had eaten a dodgy one, spent a very rough night, over which we shall draw a discreet veil, and I’d been unable to eat one ever since. I continued to love oysters in principle and tried regularly to overcome the problem. We’re not talking actual science here, but once a year, when I had to sit and watch friends sucking down the first oysters of the season, I would pick one up. I’d do the business with the mignonette and the fork, raise the half shell to my mouth until the rough edge lay along my bottom lip, tip and slurp.
As the damn thing glided past my tonsils, my eyes would be watering, my vision blurring, the gag reflex kicking in and my stomach switching to a spin-cycle. Oyster and I never successfully left the restaurant together, and this went on for 20 years. So, I did what any responsible hack should do and talked to medics. If you grilled oysters or stewed them, I could hoick down dozens with no ill effects.
My reaction to the uncooked oyster was entirely psychological What became obvious was that while a single “bad” oyster can make you sick, it doesn’t leave any toxins in your body that might cause the reaction again, so I didn’t have some kind of persistent “oyster poisoning”. It was also evident that my subsequent response to oysters had been simply rejection with no other signs of allergic reaction. No matter how fashionable it might have been, the oyster could not have “given” me an allergy.
It’s quite possible, said one wise physician, that it was all in my head. I questioned a psychiatrist and, weirdly perhaps, a hypnotist. Sure, they said. The body has a spontaneous vomiting reaction and it could be triggered by a firmly implanted memory. If my mind associated oysters with the experience of a night of shivering, wrenching, humiliating purging, well, my mind was quite capable of making sure that future oysters wouldn’t stay down for more than a few seconds.
It was interesting, they said, how this kind of thing happened with substances that have unique smells or physical sensations. Think how many people, for example, “can’t even smell tequila without being ill”. It’s a kind of gustatory flashback. For me, it was the touch of the shell against my lip or the slithery texture that did the trick. If you grilled oysters or stewed them, I could hoick down dozens with no ill effects. My reaction to the uncooked oyster was entirely psychological, yet it manifested itself in a viscerally physical way over which I had no control.
All of which led to an incredibly strange exchange with a famous chef, much versed in hypnosis and tricks of the mind. We all know, he said, that oysters can’t be an aphrodisiac, right? There’s no such thing. But imagine if your first taste of oysters had been followed by a memorable sexual experience. We all know that sexual response is likewise “all-in-your-head” and it wouldn’t take long for oysters to “code” for sexual arousal, just as surely as they have, in my case, for throwing up. “Aphrodisiac” bivalves might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. They might also be Viagra in conveniently shucked dozens.
Decades ago, when GPs still wore suits and put the fear of God into their patients, if you reported feeling pain, your doctor would seek the cause. If it wasn’t apparent, you might be sent away with stern warnings that it was “all in your head” and you should stop wasting NHS time. Today, things are mercifully different. Now we can scan brains and watch activity in real time, and we know that believing that you are in pain lights up precisely the same places as “real” pain. Our entire philosophy of diagnosis has been turned upside down as we’ve realised what pain is, and that it actually happens in the brain.
On one hand, the result is a more humane approach to human suffering; on the other, recognition of a range of chronic disorders that we can’t explain, much less cure.
There are all sorts of stories told in the wine world about experienced tasters sipping wines from the “wrong” shaped bottles and misidentifying a Burgundy as a Bordeaux. There are tales of oenophiles who can’t tell red from white wine when it’s served in a black glass. But perhaps that just doesn’t matter.
Like pain, the parts of your brain that light up are as much to do with your belief as with the stuff in the bottle. If those round shoulders and a picture of a castle on the label make a bottle of last year’s natural Lambrusco taste like a 1982 Chateau Margaux… well, it’s not about the taste, it’s about what’s in your head, you lucky bugger. And as for the interminable arguments about whether terroir can be scientifically proven to exist or not, who cares? If you believe it hard enough, of course it does. For people with any interest in food science, this can cause a kind of rage of cognitive dissonance.
We know that the need for “eight glasses of water a day” has as much grounding in reality as the mercury cure for syphilis. We’ve seen the proof that “Chinese restaurant syndrome” is an urban myth and that “a sugar rush” exists to the same extent as the Tooth Fairy, but are people convinced? Not a chance. And therein hangs the awful Catch-22. If someone believes that the monosodium glutamate in their noodles is giving them red cheeks, sweats and cluster headaches, it might actually end up doing so.
That the same person can eat their own weight in MSG-packed “western” snacks and suffer no symptoms at all would logically indicate that the root cause is racism rather than glutamate, but the physical result is the same. In some respects, it’s unfortunate that there seem to be limits to what food can achieve in the mind. There are thousands of processed foods that promise therapeutic effects.
While manufacturers can no longer make unsupported claims that a food is “healthy”, they can still throw around words like “clean”, “well-being” or “plant-based” as dog-whistles to the worried well, and it’s clear from the billions that the market is worth every year that there’s an enormous audience who really believe that the latest nostrum will make them thin, fit and immortal. That’s a huge amount of belief. That kind of belief brings someone like Donald Trump into office, accompanied by Tinkerbell on a unicorn that farts glitter. And does all that wanting make it happen?
If we choose to think that we’re younger, fitter and more beautiful, does the power of what’s in our heads change our bodies? Nope. Einstein never actually said that “the definition of madness is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results”. Be that as it may, when a society repeatedly buys into this stuff despite consistent invalidation, well, that kind of self-delusion, if it’s not madness, must be something very like it. It always seems a little facile to compare food to sex, but it’s hard not to.
We must reproduce; we have to eat and drink. We also live in a society where, thank god, it is acceptable to take pleasure in both. It was a great advance in human sexuality when we accepted that good sex has very little to do with the acts themselves, little to do with our physical shapes, experience or techniques and that the important stuff goes on between our ears. Is it too much to hope that we can come to a similar understanding about what we eat and drink?
Follow Tim on Twitter @TimHayward and email him at tim.hayward@ft.com