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Alexis Soyer was perhaps the greatest chef of Victorian England. He designed the most modern kitchen of the 1840s and equipped it with many of his own inventions. He cooked unimaginably luxurious — and expensive — dinners for royalty and the aristocracy. He also built soup kitchens for the poor and his Famine Soup fed hundreds of thousands of destitute people in Ireland. His cookbooks sold in the hundreds of thousands, and sauces bearing his name brought luxury to the middle classes. He transformed British army cooking during the Crimean War, and the stove he invented for Crimea was still in use in the Gulf War in 1982. During the Crimean War, people said his name would live alongside Florence Nightingale’s. It didn’t, although lately Soyer, one of the first celebrity chefs, is being rediscovered.

Notes

1. Ruth Brandon’s book The People’s Chef has different subtitles in different places. You should be able to find a copy.
2. Frank Clement-Lorford maintains a website dedicated to Alexis Soyer, where you can get his book and read, for example, about the restaurant, Soyer’s Universal Symposium of all Nations. There’s a more academic account by April Bullock in Gastronomica.
3. Many people who write about Soyer try to reproduce his recipes. Lost Past Remembered shares some history of the Reform Club with a version of Soyer’s famous grouse salad.
4. Hot on the Trail by Thomas A.P. van Leeuwen contains a few errors of fact but is good on Soyer’s inventions. Forgotten history – Soyer’s Stoves offers a more military perspective on his stoves.
5. Music by Podington Bear. Images from the Wellcome Trust.

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This is the third in a little mini-series on taste. First came Margot Finn discussing disputations about taste and then Chad Ludington explained how you are what you drink. Now they’re both back, along with a snippet from a long-ago episode with sommelier Marco Lori to round out the discussion. I can’t guarantee that I won’t return to the subject again in the future, not least because I find it endlessly fascinating.

The challenge, I think, is disentangling aspects of gustatory taste that are common to all human beings from those that are overlaid — or do I mean underpinned? — by personal experience or cultural context. So when we say sweet is pleasurable and bitter aversive, what does it mean to say that an adult has a sweet tooth? I freely admit to having a bit of a sweet tooth myself, but I also revel in bitter tastes. How did that happen?

Another puzzle is the memory of complex flavours and how we analyse, process, store and recall the memory. I’ve never put much effort into being able to discriminate among similar but different tastes; I can just about recognise certain wines, for example, but am in awe of people who can discern a particular maker or, even more so, a vintage. So I’m intrigued by Chad Ludington’s thought experiment, that a bunch of randomly selected people would, over time, converge on liking the same few examples of a particular food. Would they? I’d love to see the experiment tried.

Our conversation sent me back to consider some things I first read back in 2011, on the website of Seth Roberts. He was an extremely interesting psychologist and writer who was a great one for self-experimentation. Seth wrote that side-by-side comparisons provided the best opportunity to learn about differences and resulted in an almost instant connoisseurship, which he called the Willats Effect after a friend who pointed it out to him. And, as Seth explained, there’s a downside to this:

Five or six years ago I went to a sake-tasting event in San Francisco called “The Joy of Sake”. About 140 sakes. In a few hours I became such a sake connoisseur that the sake I could afford — and used to buy regularly — I now despised. The only sake I now liked was so expensive ($80/bottle) that I never bought another bottle of sake.

Starting with The Willat Effect: Side-by-Side Comparisons Create Connoisseurs and following the links from there you’ll see that although the results are sometimes confounded, it does seem to be the case that side-by-side comparisons very effectively show you what you like.

I’m ready to try that with chocolate. Or bitter liqueurs. You know where to find me.

Notes

1. Food Fights, the book that prompted this mini-series, is published by University of North Carolina Press.
2. Chad Ludington teaches history at North Carolina State University.
3. S. Margot Finn is “inconsistently” on Twitter.
4. Marco Lori’s website is Off the Vine
5. Banner photo from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Those barbels around its mouth are where it keeps its taste buds. Cover photo by Anne on Flickr. Twitter photo by Jason Lam from Flickr

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• Good news everyone! New test could guarantee the perfect avocado.
• The Counter says small chicken farmers are doing OK, while smaller slaughterhouses are still being butchered by the big guys.
• Ancient grains? We got ‘em. The revival of the grains that the ancient Greeks called zea and Bruce Pascoe’s first modern harvest of “dancing grass” down under.
• Canadian hop growers crying politely into their beer.
• If the “the Canadian Native Haute Cuisine Team” can take gold at the Culinary Olympics, what’s stopping those lacklustre Canadian craft brewers?
• Anyone doing home-schooling on the Egyptians? This one’s for you.

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Taste has never really been purely subjective, good taste has always come with the baggage of social status and moral superiority. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in politics, where the extended meanings of taste — refinement, discernment, judgement — brought with them an assumption that these were also the qualities associated with the ability to govern well. If you could choose a superior wine, of course you could choose a superior policy for the nation.

Chad Ludington, Professor of History at North Carolina State University, has studied the politics of wine in Britain extensively. He told me how changes in the production of wine, against the background of changes in political relationships between England and France and in the social structure of England, combined to make one’s choice of wine an important statement about one’s self-image.

In America, beer plays the part of wine in Britain, but the story is practically identical.

Notes

1. Would you like a transcript?
2. Professor Ludington’s book is The Politics of Wine in Britain: A New Cultural History.
3. A few years ago we talked about How the Irish created the great wines of Bordeaux (and elsewhere).
4. Food Fights, the book that prompted this episode, is published by University of North Carolina Press.
5. Ale to the Chief (which is pretty clever) provides the background to Barack’s brews.
6. Official White House photo by Pete Souza. Bottles of port by F. Tronchin on Flickr. Portrait of Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford, by Jean-Baptiste van Loo.

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• Jayson Lusk explains Changes in Meat Supply and Demand and what that actually means, at least in the US …
• … where lack of meat is not part of greater food insecurity.
• Another topinambour, monsieur?
• The University of Pisa gets to promote the natural variability of the fig.
• Faster, breeder! More! More!
  • Tasty maize!
  • Tasty barley, maybe not so much.
• Why should you care that Scottish Archaeologists Discover Ruins of Massive Lost Wine-Bottle Glass Factory? Because bottle technology changed tastes, as will be explained in nest week’s episode.