YOU are at a restaurant, enjoying a meal with friends, when the main course arrives. The plate of seafood in front of you looks incredible, but nothing prepares you for what happens next. After a few mouthfuls, a lump begins to rise in your throat and your eyes well up. By the time the waiter comes to take the plate away, you are weeping into a tear-sodden napkin. The secret ingredient? Seaside noises.
It is just one recently documented reaction that points to a singular truth: there is a lot more to flavour than taste alone. Anything from your choice of cutlery to the music you listen to while eating can directly affect your appreciation of a meal, with sometimes surprising intensity. Restaurateurs have already begun to augment their craft with these insights, but so can we all. Appeal to more than just your guests’ tastebuds this festive season, and you too can become a multisensory master chef.
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We have known for a while that flavour doesn’t just happen on the tongue. As far back as the 1820s, French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin proposed that “smell and taste are in fact but a single sense, whose laboratory is in the mouth and whose chimney is in the nose”. But over the past decade, we have begun to realise just how mixed up our senses are. What began with curious observations such as people soon migrated to questions of taste, says , a psychologist at the University of Oxford.
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Take visual cues. Colour and taste are known to be intimately associated in our minds – red, for example, means sweet-tasting food, while green is associated with sour. This could be an evolutionarily conditioned response to fruits tending to redden as they ripen, but something similar extends even to the accessories on which food is presented. When last year Spence served up identical strawberry mousses on white and black plates, his sensory guinea pigs rated the mousse on the white plate 10 per cent sweeter and 15 per cent more intense than the mousse on the black plate. One explanation, Spence says, is that a white plate increases the colour contrast with the strawberry mousse, making it look redder and therefore taste sweeter. He is now working with the renowned French chef to test the effect of plate colour on the taste of other desserts.
The white-plate trick is one to remember when attempting to impress your dinner guests, but it might be worth investing in some cool-coloured glasses, too. In 2003, at the University of Southern Brittany in France found participants in his study rated , and less thirst-quenching when it was presented in a yellow glass.
Shape might also play a part. of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, found that tasters rate cheese as slightly sharper when shown a series of angular shapes beforehand. Food served on a star-shaped plate is rated as more bitter than food served on a round plate.
“Tasters rate cheese as sharper when shown angular shapes beforehand”
Spence says it is hard to pin down what exactly causes these kinds of cross-sensory associations. But it seems we transfer many of the physical properties of the receptacles from which we eat and drink onto their contents. Spence’s colleague Betina Piqueras-Fiszman has found that people eating yogurt from a bowl rate it as the heavier the bowl is. Heavier bowls even made people feel more full. Similarly, people are more likely to describe water as tasting “cheap” .
Perhaps the most unexpected sensory weapon, however, is sound. Spence has been documenting aural crossover effects since 2004. He started by asking people to munch their way through nearly 200 potato crisps each, rating their crispness and freshness one by one. At the same time, real-time audio of their own chewing was played to them through headphones, but with the volume and frequency of the crunching sounds randomly modified. The participants rated the crisps crisper and fresher when the volume was turned up and the frequency was high ().
That prompted Spence to team up with star chef Heston Blumenthal at his Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, UK. They conducted a small experiment in which people tasted two oysters, one while listening to sounds of the sea and one accompanied by farmyard noises. The volunteers rated the sea-sound oyster as – and the idea for one of Blumenthal’s signature dishes, “”, was born. It is composed of a plate of delicate seafood which guests eat as they listen to ocean sounds, including crashing waves and sea gulls, using headphones connected to an iPod tucked into a sea shell. , but according to diners the aural accompaniment caused the food to taste more authentic, more intense and more “seafoody”.
Headphones are not particularly sociable at a dinner party, but applying a little science to our choice of background music might allow us all to harness sound as a seasoning. No matter their culture of origin, people tend to associate larger objects with lower pitched sounds, and the same seems to be true of flavours. When in a recent experiment musicians were asked to , they came up with the same types of tunes: sour was high-pitched and dissonant, sweet was softer, bitter was low-pitched, and salty was staccato. In another study, bitter tastes were predominantly matched with brass instruments, and sweet tastes with the piano (see “Drum me up a burger!”).
These soundtracks might even change our perception of taste. Last year, staff at the Fat Duck dished up cinder toffee, which has both bitter and sweet tastes, while Spence served up one of two musical accompaniments: one “sweet” and violin-based, and one “bitter” and predominantly trombone-based. Listening to the sweet music made the toffee taste sweeter, while listening to the bitter music accentuated its bitter notes.
As you prepare to wow your dinner guests with these multi-sensory delights, the best bit is most of us remain blissfully ignorant of how much more there is to flavour than just taste. “Often I think we don’t have any awareness at all,” says Spence. “We always think we are really tasting the food or judging the wine.” So, if the table is set and the music is playing, there’s just one more thing to do before the first unsuspecting guest rings the doorbell: make sure this magazine is well out of sight.
Sensational spoons
You can manipulate all five senses to influence the flavour of your food (see main story), but there is a much simpler way to enhance the meals you dish up: season them with the right tableware.
As , a materials scientist at University College London, surmised, spoons made of different metals induce different tastes. Indeed, she showed in blind taste tests that chow taken with copper and zinc spoons tasted stronger, more metallic and more bitter than food eaten with gold and chrome spoons, which tasted the most pleasant. The more reactive the metal, the stronger the taste it imparted.
But the results were sometimes unexpected. Volunteers who used the different spoons to taste cream – salty, bitter, sweet, sour and plain – reported that zinc and copper spoons accentuated their different taste attributes. “When you start to pair it with food,” Laughlin says, “[the spoon] can make it taste better.”
Carefully selecting the right type of spoon might enhance the flavours of certain dishes, says Laughlin. She is now developing a set of spoons, which come with tasting notes, to do exactly that.
