no. 114: or not?

Good in the making.

Yesterday Nathan asked, with his usual perspicuity:

I seem to know whether a dish is good or not by instinct. Which means that I sometimes don’t really rely on my memory to compare that to the prior standard, but seem to know it the moment I taste it. How does this interact with the things you’ve said about how humans have a hard time remembering taste and smell, and the importance of trusting your tongue?

It’s been an epistolary week, so I accidentally wrote him a 1200 word reply, which happened to capture a lot of things I’ve previously only been able to write around, but not write out. With his permission, I’ve reproduced it here.

---

“Is this good or not?” can mean several different things, and the first thing to do is distinguish between them.

I think the three most important possibilites are:

1. Do I like this? Am I enjoying eating it?

2. Is this expert cooking?

3. Is this correct? Is it a good example of what it claims to be?

There may well be others that I’m missing. I’m not a philosopher. But I think this is a good start.

Question 1 is valuable because it’s the foundational question for knowing your palate. In some ways this is the easiest question to answer, because it’s entirely subjective. No one can tell you what you really like, though everyone will try. But this also makes it the hardest question, because it asks you to be honest with yourself, to have the integrity and courage to say, “yes, I love what I’m eating” even when everything around you tells you that you shouldn’t.

Maybe your favorite sushi is from the little grocery store near your house. Maybe it’s under-seasoned, or the rice is not properly cooked. It might not be expert sushi, nor even an exemplar of sushi – and those things matter. But so does the fact that you fundamentally, viscerally, like it! Maybe Cheetos or potato chips really scratch your itch (yes, I’ll take another fig newton please). Think about the phrase “guilty pleasure” – who’s guilt tripping you, and why the hell do they have the right to do so?

If you can’t answer this question, you’ll never know what you actually want in food, and no other question about food matters more.

It sounds like you’re blessed with clarity here, and know whether you like something almost immediately, even if you’ve never encountered it before. That’s wonderful, honest, and brave! The next step is to ask why you like it. Is it because there’s a particular flavor? Because it’s just salty enough for you? Because it’s the right texture or the perfect temperature? All of these are great places to start.

But there’s another, more complicated set of considerations here, which are rarely discussed – these have to do with the fact that your palate changes. It changes with age, with the weather, with your mood. Things taste better when you’re relaxed. Being in peak physical condition might cause you to be more sensitive, or less. It might change your criteria for what tastes good, depending on what your body thinks it needs. You become more or less sensitive to certain flavors as you age, and your preferences change too. All these affect your decisions about whether you like something or not, and here again, you need the courage to admit this, and to embrace the fact that changes come.

I think about this set of considerations in terms of calibration, which may or may not be the best way to think about it. I think of my palate and preferences as changing with time, slowly, and when I taste something, I try to think about the short term factors that influence my perception of it. Am I out on a good date? Happy to see an old friend? Aching from the dojo? Mad at my boss? Too cold, too hot? All of these matter.

On a longer time scale, I try to remember what my palate was like. If I trust that a dish has been fairly consistent, do I enjoy the McDonald’s burger more or less than I used to? Industrial foods are actually really great for this kind of thing, though the formulas do change.

“Do I like this” is a springboard for the next question: “is this expert?” This grows out of what I wrote a few paragraphs ago, about asking why you like it.

One way to think about this is that every ingredient and every dish can be prepared to offer a local maxima of pleasure (I would actually argue that a given ingredient offers many local maxima, but let’s leave that complication aside for now). Is this ingredient prepared in such a way as to maximize its flavor and fragrance, the textural opportunities it offers, and so on?

Thomas Keller has a line about how something is seasoned correctly when you don’t want to stop eating it. This is tangled up with the question of what you like, but it’s also a good way to think about expert preparation. Something is expertly prepared when you can’t imagine what you’d change to make this taste even better – note how you can’t answer this question without deciding what you like. Note also the caveat here – it’s expertly prepared to your palate.

Once you’ve decided what you want out of an ingredient or a dish, there are two ways to dig deeper here.

The first is to consider more and more dimensions. Would this taste better if it were hotter or cooler? It tastes great, but what about mouthfeel? Would a different mouthfeel for the same level of seasoning make this better? Would this taste better if it were a brighter green? A deeper red? Perhaps most importantly, you can ask: does this feel balanced?

The second is to increase precision. I know I start to pick up variations in seasoning around 15% – I have to add around 15% more salt to a dish before I reliably perceive a difference in how salty it is (I know this because I did an experiment, which I should repeat, because that was 10 years ago). Do you know what your threshold is? You can start by thinking about “OK, this needs more salt” and getting down to “this needs a little less salt/a lot less salt” and from there to “maybe 20% more.”

Exposure matters. When you’re familiar with a dish, it’s easier to say whether it’s expertly cooked, whether you’re talking about steamed rice, bread, cut fruit, or steak. In some ways the best starting point is something you eat raw, like fruit – there’s so little else going on it’s just about the sweetness, the ripeness, the texture, the fragrance.

But exposure matters in another way too, which is that you don’t know how ripe a pear can get until you’ve had a truly ripe pear. The only thing you can do is to eat as widely as you can, and try to engrave the peaks and troughs upon your memory – and here we bleed into the third question: “is this correct?”

Here there’s no substitute for exposure and acculturation and aesthetics, and no amount of those will matter unless you can remember what you’ve tasted and smelt. I like to think the pleasure of a truly ripe peach is completely self evident – but how do you know that’s as ripe as peaches can get? If you’re eating a chartreuse, or drinking beer, how do you know what it should be?

This is a complicated question, not least because who gets to declare what a thing should be is a bloody and intractable issue in itself. But it’s worth asking for two reasons.

The first is that it teaches you your own preferences. It helps to know that you like or dislike blueberries, or strawberries, or General Tso’s Chicken. But it’s hard to know this for sure until you know you’ve had a really good version. That granitic certainty is invaluable. Unfortunately, the only way to know that what you’re eating is exemplary is to have wide exposure to the dish in question, or to eat and drink with folks who have that exposure and who you trust to say “yes, this is actually quite a good version of lamb vindaloo” (or Pommard, or Neapolitan pizza). Maybe this leads to an echo chamber. The safeguard here is to trust your palate – to trust that you like a thing or not, no matter what other people might say.

The second is that this question teaches you about aesthetics. Things generally evolved to be a certain way because people wanted them to be. Dishes embody long histories, lifetimes of thought. If you learn what a thing is supposed to be, and have a little empathy, you can figure out why people wanted it to be that way. This is how you learn to understand an unfamiliar cuisine, and how you form an aesthetic of your own. Essentially, you disagree with people, but do so in good faith, striving to understand why they’re making the arguments they’re making. This remains true even if you’re a complete iconoclast! You’ll smash those traditions with greater conviction if you understand where they’re coming from.

I hope this helps. You asked a question of great depth, and the only answer I have is more questions. The only thing I’m sure of is that asking is better than not asking.

And if you’ve read this far, please take a split second to stab that little heart at the bottom of this post, it actually helps. The magic of our algorithmic overlords is puissant! All hail!

---

Another perspective on how to taste:

---

And finally, further reading for the week: cooking for funerals. Stay warm, y’all.