What’s the most disgusting thing that you’ve ever eaten? For me it has to be the skate that I had during a recent trip to Iceland. Skate and shark don’t pee in the way other animals do, instead they expel uric acid through their skin. Somehow, sometime in the past, the Vikings cottoned on to this and developed an unusual method for cooking the fish. They were buried in the ground and left to ferment. The uric acid would turn to ammonia, tenderising and preserving the flesh.
It’s hard to describe just how horrible I found this. The smell alone made me want to gag. (Think of the most eye-wateringly pungent blue cheese you’ve ever smelt, then up it by a factor of ten.) I must have chewed my morsel of putrefied skate for about 15 seconds before spitting it out and rinsing my mouth with schnapps. This is the traditional accompaniment to the dish, although it’s not usually drunk straight from the bottle!
There are plenty of rivals, of course, for the title of the world’s most disgusting food. There are places in Africa where dried cow’s urine is added to stews, and in China, live baby eels are added to warm saké so that, as you drink, they tickle the back of your throat. To us, these practices may seem beyond the pale, but plenty of people prize them. There is almost no food or drink that is intrinsically disgusting. If it’s edible or potable, someone somewhere likes it. Our flavour preferences tend to be learnt, and the education begins early.
An 11-week-old foetus can detect aroma, which is a key part of flavour. The unborn baby breathes in flavour molecules from the amniotic fluid that surrounds it. By the time it emerges, it has formed preferences for some of those flavours. And the process continues. Studies at the Monell Chemical Senses Centre in Philadelphia have shown that breast-fed babies increase their sucking rate when the mother eats garlic or vanilla. Monell has also studied the eating behaviour of bottle-fed children and discovered a link between the type of milk they drank and the types of flavours they had come to prefer. Children fed on soya-based formula milk, for example, were more likely to enjoy broccoli than those fed on a milk-based formula. We like to think of our food likes and dislikes as personal but in fact they are often the product of outside influences. A society’s values play a large part in this, of course. The Japanese will eat live soft-shelled crab, a prospect that many in the West would balk at, but the Japanese find rice pudding repulsive.
These food taboos are capricious and contradictory. Fermented food, even when it’s less full-on than my Viking delicacy, is generally shunned in the West, yet most of us have a bottle of Worcestershire sauce in the cupboard, which contains fermented anchovies. Reluctance to eat something is often down to the associations it has for us. A lot of the trouble I had with fermented skate was because the nose-wrinkling whiff of ammonia reminded me of toilet cleaner. Europeans tend to find wintergreen (which has a distinct menthol characteristic) unacceptable as a flavour, because they associate the smell with ointments. In the US, however, it’s accepted because it’s familiar from root beer and gum.
Advertisement
So, far from being fixed and physical, our culinary likes and dislikes are acquired. They are formed, rather like our opinions, from what’s going on around us, and from our memories and associations. I find it really interesting that Alzheimer’s patients are often prepared to eat foods that they previously disliked. It shows how influential memory is on our appreciation of food.
What does this mean for the cook? It means that when we prepare food we aren’t just appealing to the mouth and the nose, we’re appealing to the brain. If associations and memory have such a big role in determining whether we like something, then playing upon those associations and memories will help the cook to produce a powerful, emotional and sensual eating experience.