On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen

So, unlike the rest of the plant, fruit is meant to be eaten. This is why its taste, odor, and texture are so appealing to our animal senses. But the invitation to eat must be delayed until the seeds are mature and viable. This is the purpose of the changes in color, texture, and flavor that we call ripening. Leaves, roots, stalks can be eaten at a... See more

Try the experiment of chewing on an oregano leaf, or a clove, or a vanilla bean. The result is far from pleasurable! When eaten as is, most spices and herbs are acrid, irritating, numbing.

But freezing kills plant tissues, which suffer two kinds of damage. One is chemical: as the water crystallizes, enzymes and other reactive molecules become unusually concentrated and react abnormally. The other damage is physical disruption caused by the water crystals, whose edges puncture cell walls and membranes.

Thoughtful cooking means paying attention to what our senses tell us as we prepare it, connecting that information with past experience and with an understanding of what’s happening to the food’s inner substance, and adjusting the preparation accordingly.

Unlike most of the objects that we sense around us, which we see or touch or hear, aromas are an invisible, intangible presence. To cultures that knew nothing of molecules and odor receptors, this ethereal, penetrating quality suggested a realm of invisible beings and powers.

The flavors of herbs and spices are defensive chemical weapons that are released from plant cells when the plant is chewed on. Their volatility gives them the advantage of counterattacking through the air, not just on direct contact, and of being a warning signal that can train some animals to be deterred by smell alone.

In the modern system of food production, with crops being handled in massive quantities and shipped thousands of miles, the most important crop characteristics became productivity, uniformity, and durability. Rather than being bred for flavor and harvested at flavor’s peak, fruits and vegetables were bred to withstand the rigors of mechanical harve... See more

Fruits are plant organs that actually invite animals to eat them, so that the animals will carry their seeds away, and often pass them through their digestive system and deposit them in a nourishing pile of manure.

If our nose is blocked by a cold or pinching fingers, it’s hard to tell the difference between an apple and a pear. So most of what we experience as flavor is odor, or aroma. Herbs and spices heighten flavor by adding their characteristic aroma molecules.