Jeni Britton Bauer of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams makes (and eats) an ice cream sundae inspired by Estee Lauder Bronze Goddess. She uses cherries cold-poached in orange blossom water and peach liqueur, Salty Caramel ice cream, toasted coconut flakes and honey whipped cream; you can find the recipe here.
Proust had his madeleines
Proust had his madeleines; I have the holy trinity. That smell immediately ushers forth countless memories of youth, my mother dutifully sauteeing the trinity to begin something that, inevitably, would be enjoyed by the family with unsparing alacrity and glee. If we were lucky, it’d be her famous crawfish etouffee. I have friends from college who to this day still ask me for her recipe. It’s that good. And it all starts with that inimitable punch to the smell center of the brain...which just happens to be the same part of your brain that processes memories. There is no small coincidence there, friends.
— Scott Gold writes about the smell of the holy trinity in New Orleans cooking, in An Ode To The Olfactory: The Best And Worst Smells In New Orleans at New Orleans Public Radio.
Perfume bottle cake
I'll be whipping one of these up later today.
Sensation Chloe
Master pastry chef Pierre Hermé makes Sensation Chloé, “a dessert that captures the contrasting combinations of unctuousness, density of chocolate and freshness of raspberry”, to mark White Day. The “moreish delicacy” was served at the Café Dior in Seoul.* In French, but chocolate is easy to understand in any language.
Vanilla isn’t actually sweet
Those associations can then be used to trigger the reward system even when the perceived reward is smaller than the actual one. Take vanilla. Vanilla isn’t actually sweet. It’s quite bitter. But in the Western world, we have come to associate it with sweet foods, and so, to us, it signals sweetness. When we smell it, our sweet receptors go on high alert—and the food we eat tastes sweeter than it otherwise would.
— Maria Konnikova writes about the emerging field of neurogastronomy and Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant The Fat Duck. Read more at This Man Will Transform How You Eat at New Republic.