If I merely say 'orange peel'—or, for instance, 'warm cinnamon bun' or 'rose'—you'll smell it, even though what the words say isn't there. In a way, a phantom orange peel smells stronger than a real one because, if you think about it, nothing's physically present.
Such is the power of smell or, more properly, such is the power of the memory to smell. It's like that for all of us, with smells and tastes, and perhaps most strongly with our first smells and tastes of certain things. It is that way, I think, because we can make our pasts present again.
I know that I never again will taste that sweet butter I had for breakfast 30 years ago at a small café near a small railway station in a small town in western France.
'Sweet' is too weak a word. You know how you might lap at a spoonful of warm heavy cream? Or the way cocoa butter liquefies on your lips? Or how butter is pretty when it's left undyed, churned to its natural color, the hue of dry hay? That's how it was.
I've tried to find that butter again, but all the tastes of all the butters that I've swiped in 30 years aren't that butter's taste. I don't know why.
In any case, I have that butter's taste, every time I want it, just as real and delicious as it was that crisp fall morning. I simply remember it and bring it back.
I can do that with the aroma of botrytis and the honeyed tastes of the 1937 Chateau d'Yquem that I let coat my mouth in 1974. Or a perfect hard-cooked egg—with a double yolk!—I once ate at a corner bar in Paris. Or the grainy frottage that tickled my tongue along with the winey blood and fine fiber of a beef steak in Argentina several years ago.
Best of all, because I need only call them back from memory, I can have all I want of all of these.
The absence of something can be better than its presence. And sometimes, it is better not to have what one wants than to have it.
I do not eat restaurant tomatoes anymore, not unless it's late July or August and the kitchen has taken them off a vine—but how often does that happen, even in late July or August? Asparagus is best in the spring, my spring, not Chile's or Mexico's spring.
It's better not to eat something when it isn't right than to eat it all year 'round, when it comes courtesy of shipping companies and frequent-flyer miles.
Anyone should know this, especially about tomatoes. Just because it's called a tomato, and looks like a tomato—not very much like, but barely like—doesn't mean that it is a tomato. That pink ball of cardboard doesn't smell like one, or certainly taste like one. In truth, it isn't one.
That's why a true tomato, and true asparagus, and so many other foods tied to their time of year, taste better when we've waited for them. They taste better because, at one time or for a few months, they were absent from our plates—because they weren't there to be tasted.
And what about the opposite of nothing, a lot of something?
I once stared down at a 500-gram tin of Sevruga caviar—I adore caviar, I crave caviar—of which I was told I could eat as much as I wanted.
Oh, I ate it, spoonfuls of it, mounds of it on buckwheat blinis. I put some on my fingernail, gazed at it, and slurped it off. I ate half the tin and stopped only because I feared to be sick, not because I had had my fill of caviar.
It is the same with oysters. I once ate 60 in one evening and held off on a sixth dozen only because I also had had half a dozen ales.
Yes, I was a pig, but I am not shamed of it. I would have gone on, had I the constitution or fortitude, like Diamond Jim Brady, no apologies.
But what I've learned since then is that oysters and caviar don't taste as good in large amounts as they do in small.
After a dozen oysters now—well, OK, sometimes two dozen—I stop, in order to tease myself with a limit. Because next time, the next oysters will taste better for it. And I eat caviar in little doses, too, wee mounds of grains from a small mother-of-pearl spoon. It tastes better that way.
That's because the difference between a lot of something and a little of it—that is to say, between something and its absence —is the best flavoring a food can have.
Send your questions to Bill St. John at saintbill@hotmail.com .
