What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [50]
At cultural boundaries the smell of food become an invisible, fragrant fence. One study went to the trouble to prove that bonito flakes smell like food to Japanese people but not to Germans; the opposite is true for marzipan. You eat what you were raised on. The most unsettling result of this study was that nearly 40 percent of the German ladies interviewed found the smell of Vicks VapoRub to be edible.
Does the fragrant fence limit us to the food aromas of our birth culture? Not necessarily; but there are hazards in jumping the fence. These are nicely depicted in Radhika Jha’s novel Smell. Leela, a young Indian woman born in Kenya, is sent to live with relatives who run an Indian grocery in Paris. Aromatic crosscurrents are present from the opening sentence: “When the wind blew hard, as it did very often that spring, the smell of fresh baguette would fight its way into the Epicerie Madras to do battle with the prickly smell of pickles and masalas.” Leela has a fine awareness of scent and is skilled at cooking with traditional Indian spices. As she learns the ways of Paris she improvises new dishes and creates new possibilities for her love life and career. (She takes a French lover and becomes the darling of the Parisian fusion cuisine scene.) Eventually, Leela realizes that the scents that make her exotic and attractive also make her an outsider. As an author, Radhika Jha has an extraordinary feel for the boundary-creating power of scent, perhaps because she herself lived in Paris as an exchange student. By showing how one woman used scent to redefine her relation to two cultures, she proves it is possible to cross the fragrant fence.
SOME FOOD AROMAS raise the fence to unscalable heights. For example, if you are not Swedish it is unlikely that you can be persuaded to try Surströmming. Surströmming is fermented herring, and is horrifically foul-smelling even to those who consider it a national delicacy. Another Scandinavian specialty is lutefisk. To make it, one soaks air-dried codfish in water for several days, then in a solution of caustic lye for another couple of days, and ends with a few more days in plain water. The result is a swollen, jellylike mass of smelly fish flesh that is popular in Norway and the Norwegian-heavy precincts of Minnesota and Wisconsin. Garrison Keillor recalls lutefisk as “a repulsive gelatinous fishlike dish that tasted of soap and gave off an odor that would gag a goat.” But people who consider themselves true Sons of Knut eat it at least once a year. Norwegians are not insane; they know lutefisk smells bad. But they have carved out a special exemption for it—they’ve made it a badge of belonging.
The psychologist Donald E. Brown compiled a list of cultural universals that includes things like music, proverbs, incest avoidance, and death rituals. I would like to propose an addition to the list of universals: every culture has a foul-smelling food for membership. You are not really Taiwanese unless you eat “stinky tofu” (chunks of fermented soybean curd). You are not really Icelandic unless you eat harkarl (rotten shark meat). Real Japanese eat natto (a gluey mass of fermented soybeans that smells like creosote). Then there is the fabulously stinky durian, or jackfruit, of southeast Asia. Singapore being Singapore, one is allowed to eat its sweet, custardy innards, but it is illegal to carry it on public transportation. I’m personally a big fan of kimchi, the national condiment of Korea. It’s made from fermented Chinese cabbage, vinegar, garlic, fish sauce, and lots of red pepper. It packs a punch—a bottle of it once exploded in my refrigerator. Its postingestive