Authors: Molly Birnbaum
I could smell the chestnuts roasting on Broadway, the patchouli on a woman in the Strand. There was the stench of the subway, the body odor of the gym. Butter reeked in the fridge, but not nearly as much as the leftover wonton soup Matt ate in the next room. I could smell the steam heat and the frozen concrete, the stagnant puddles and a stranger’s cologne.
I thought of Rachel Herz, and our conversation about the connection between scent and emotion. Happiness had played a role in my ability to smell. But what about anxiety? Could that, too?
I did some research and found a 2005 study that looked at the effect of personality and emotional state on olfactory perception. Pamela Dalton, the same sensory psychologist at Monell who had worked on smell and PTSD, and her colleague, Denise Chen, found that men perceived scents more intensely while in a positive or negative emotional state. She also found that women who scored high on anxiety personality tests perceived odors more fiercely, too.
I called Herz. What about me?
“Well,” she said. “This is just speculation, but the depression-olfaction loop could go in the opposite direction as well.” Anxiety, she explained, is a heightened emotional state in which levels of dopamine and serotonin are enhanced, invigorating the limbic system, that structure of emotion and memory that, of course, also deals in olfaction.
“Could that improve my ability to smell?”
“It makes sense,” she said.
One evening a week after Matt got the letter, only a few days into my panicked search for a new apartment, I stood in a parking garage on the Upper West Side. I was on assignment for a freelance journalism gig, assigned to watch a group of high school kids build robots, and was reporting with a notebook and pen amid a crowd of teachers, students, and electrical wiring.
Inhaling and exhaling slowly against the back-lit scent of dank concrete, I caught a whiff of cologne, a hint of sweat, and the strong aroma of motor oil. Someone to my left opened the plastic lid to a cup of hot chocolate and the scent—rich, sweet—hit me from several feet away. A moment later there was the peppermint breath of an interview subject chewing gum. Someone was drinking orange juice; I could smell the pungent citrus before I saw the container in a teacher’s hand. I could hardly concentrate in the face of so many scents. I was exhausted but alert, jazzed on anxiety and caffeine and the thrill of so many smells. I was in a dark, cold parking garage, but it had been a long time since everything seemed so alive.
I MET WITH OLIVER SACKS
again in the weeks before Matt was due to depart. On my way to his office in the West Village, I passed well-coiffed businessmen behind the glass wall of an upscale restaurant and hipsters tapping on their keyboards at a bakery called Soy. Schoolkids ran down the damp sidewalk to my side. I wore a short-sleeved gray dress, just long enough to cover the shimmering white scar that still crept down my left leg. I felt on edge, a little nervous, like everything around me was moving just a bit too fast.
I entered a building with a green awning on the corner and made my way up to his office, now familiar with its knickknacks and lore. We sat in rolling chairs and talked about the recent books on smell. We talked about Darwin and about Philadelphia and disgust. We talked about journals and notes and illustrations. We talked a lot about his struggle with his waning vision, and his loss of stereovision. He was, in fact, writing a book about it. We talked about how he is able to juxtapose himself as a patient and a doctor within the pages of the same book.
Toward the end of my visit, Sacks moved over to his desk and picked up the bright yellow stone, still in the same place as it had been a year earlier, when we first met there. He didn’t seem to remember that I had tried to smell it before. I didn’t want to smell it again. I hadn’t been able to in the past, and I disliked being faced with reality on too regular a basis. But I said nothing as he held it up to my face, the crystal beads almost touching the tip of my nose. I breathed in deeply and let the inhalation warm as it flowed through my nose.
I was surprised.
“What does it smell like?” he asked.
First it was sweet. A sugary, liquid twang clung to the back of my nose. And then there was an acrid scent, one of rotting eggs. It was an afternoon I spent with my family near my aunt’s home in Hawaii, pausing on black lava rock.
“That’s sulfur,” I said.
And as I spoke, there was suddenly another memory, vaporous and light. This one of my family and me in another National Park. Years later, this time: Yellowstone. “It’s like the geysers out west,” I added.
“Yes,” Sacks said, with a smile. “Like a volcano.”
MATT AND I
escaped to Argentina for the better part of March in order to avoid the manic schedule of New York, the thoughts of war, and the empty bags waiting to be packed.
We walked the streets of Buenos Aires, which, with its wide streets, cosmopolitan culture and pockets of French architecture, reminded us of Paris. We ate thick cuts of beef and rounds of sausage juicy from the grill. We drove hundreds of miles on gravel roads north to Salta, where we biked around vineyards, and ate wine-flavored ice cream in the sun. The tipsy midnight dinners and bumpy backcountry roads skirting the foothills of the Andes allowed us to forget, for moments, what was to come.
We returned to the States to spend a week at Matt’s family’s vacation home in Tennessee, where he would pack for his yearlong deployment. It was just the two of us and we had no schedule. We spent days hiking among the Appalachian Mountains in tennis shoes and evenings watching movies on the couch. We shopped at Walmart, ate pulled pork sandwiches in empty restaurants off the highway, and tried hard to avoid the rain. I cooked a lot.
I made bowls of rice and beans, spicy with a Creole condiment from Matt’s home state, Louisiana. I baked chocolate chip cookies and a pot of vanilla-scented rice pudding. One night I cooked spaghetti with a thick meat ragu, Matt’s favorite dish, which he requested whenever he could. I made the sauce with a
soffrito
of onions, carrots, and celery and hunks of ground pork, veal, and beef. I added garlic, tomatoes, and white wine. I used dried thyme and a bay leaf. I let it simmer on the stove for hours with chicken stock. Later, I poured in some heavy cream. It smelled rich, like garlic and like meat. It smelled like Italy, and like Matt. We ate it all.
As the sun went down and the vaulted ceilings of the house grew shadowy and dim on our final night together as civilians, Matt packed his deep green rucksacks with uniforms and combat boots. I needed to distract myself. I wanted flour on my hands and my head in a recipe.
We had eaten empanadas almost daily while in Argentina. While there I loved the dish with origins in Spain: rich, spiced fillings nestled within crisp pockets of dough. We ate them with beef, with chicken, and with cheese. We ate them baked, piled on metal trays and plopped on the table at cafés. We ate them fried, wandering through antique markets in Buenos Aires, the whorls of my fingers left slippery with grease.
I started cooking late on that warm spring night. We had spent the afternoon hiking and were moving slowly. Thoughts of the next morning, when I would drop Matt off amid a long beige line of barracks at an army base in South Carolina, were cold in the pit of my stomach.
In the kitchen I concentrated on the movement of my knife, the temperature of the oven, and the scent of butter. First I mixed the dough—a sticky, soft thing immediately sent to chill in the fridge. I sautéed onions and garlic. I watched the pink fade from a pan of crumbled beef. Olives and hard-boiled eggs came later when, combined, I let it all cool on the counter.
“It smells good,” Matt called out from the living room where he was packing, surrounded by boxes of clothes and stacks of books.
I rolled the dough into small, flour-dusted circles. I filled them, pinched them, and brushed the sculpted mounds with egg wash. They came out of the oven crackly and brown. Later, we ate them sitting on the couch with our fingers.
I was disappointed. The empanadas tasted mild and bland. I had miscalculated the ratio of dough to filling. I hadn’t used enough spice. That couch felt far from everywhere, especially Argentina. On our plates, butter replaced lard; bottles of Sam Adams for Malbec. The flavor paled in comparison to my memory of only a few weeks before. I wondered if the empanadas came out poorly because I couldn’t smell the way I once was able. I wondered if my fear—for Matt traveling to Afghanistan, for me left here behind—muted the flavors, buried the taste.
I apologized for bungling Matt’s last meal, my voice wobbly and hoarse. He just smiled. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, piling a second helping onto his plate.
The next day, he was gone.
I RETURNED TO NEW YORK
to live in a studio apartment in Brooklyn, small but filled with light. My days were spent mainly at my desk, accompanied by the clack of fingernails on keyboard. I spent the evenings with friends, becoming a practiced third wheel. I began to take long walks, especially in the mornings when the firm grip of anxiety tightened my shoulders into hard knots, raising the tone of my interior monologue to a scream. I made myself omelets and salads. I drank solitary glasses of white wine.
I thought I knew what to expect. After all, I already knew what it was to sleep alone, to wake alone. I knew what it was to eat by myself, to cook by myself, to be in possession of only my own needs. I had done single; I had done long distance. I had missed before, longed before, felt anxiety so strong that I woke at 3:00
A.M.
in chills before. “Lonely” had long been part of my vocabulary. But my definition of solitude changed when introduced to war. Especially that war, which had not touched the majority of my friends and family despite the eight years it had raged. Alone emerged painful and new.
And the intensity of my smell remained solid. Everything I ate was filled with flavor. More so than ever before.
Late that spring, I traveled to Chicago to visit my old friend Becca, who lived close by. I wanted to visit because it had been too long since we’d last seen each other. And I needed the comfort of a close friend. We had planned out our weekend reunion intricately, concentrating each day around our favorite thing, over what our friendship had first begun: food.
On that Saturday night Becca and I paused in front of Alinea, an innovative Chicago restaurant belonging to Grant Achatz, a young chef known for his relentless push against the boundaries of flavor. Achatz, whose career I had been following for years, had kindly invited us to be his guests at his small restaurant—one that would be ranked seventh by the S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants the following year. The dark brick building, inset with a heavy steel door, was unadorned. There was no awning or inscription, no movement, sound, or any signs of life. There was only an address: 1723, the numbers set in a cascade down the sidewall. We looked at each other and shrugged.
“I guess this is it,” Becca said as she pulled open the door.
We stepped gingerly into the narrow hallway entrance of Alinea. It was long and dim, illuminated by pale red-pink light, eerie after the cloak of darkness outside. My depth perception skewed by the shadows, I was surprised when we reached the end. Becca and I stood side by side, unsure of what to do next, until
whoosh,
a pair of sliding doors opened to our left. Suddenly we had the view of a bright restaurant room.
I took in my surroundings: a staircase ahead of us, a small dining room to the left. And then the kitchen, which peeled back to our right. It was a large, open room fashioned in shining silver metal. We froze in place to watch, silently, for one charged moment. The kitchen was quiet and clean, breathtakingly so. The floor was covered in carpet and the room filled with chefs wearing simple whites, gliding seamlessly just feet away. “They look like they’re meditating,” Becca said as we followed the host to our table in the small dining area upstairs.
After my time in the lab at Citromax, I had wanted to come to Alinea in order to experience another layer of flavor. Grosinger and her team created flavors for the premade and the packaged. They used a combination of taste and smell to reach flavor—an impressive combination, I knew, based on years of training. I knew that they experimented with novelty, pressing the boundaries on occasion, but only to a certain extent. In the end, their goal was simple: make it taste good.
The connection between these senses, however, could go farther. It could be concentrated and intense. It could be manipulated and maneuvered, made for shock and emotion. The connection between smell, taste, and flavor could change from science to art in the hands of a chef. Achatz, I had heard, was just such a chef.
Achatz grew up in St. Claire, Michigan, where he was surrounded by relatives who owned restaurants, where he could breathe in the scent of leaves burning on neighbors’ lawns every fall. He began his career at age five, when he washed dishes at his parents’ Achatz’s Family Restaurant, later working his way up to cooking on the line. Achatz graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, the school I had once lusted for, in 1994. After, he worked for renowned chefs and restaurateurs—first Charlie Trotter in Chicago, and then Thomas Keller, known for his perfect execution at The French Laundry, an upscale bistro in Yountville, California, in the Napa Valley. While under Keller’s tutelage, perfecting dishes like the chef’s signature “Oysters and Pearls,” or a sabayon of pearl tapioca topped with Malpeque oysters and Osetra caviar, Achatz visited El Bulli, the esteemed kitchen of Ferran Adrià, the father of molecular gastronomy, in a remote corner of Spain. It was there, I would learn the following day, when I had a chance to sit down with Achatz for an interview, that the chef first witnessed the power of smell: Adrià had him pick up a whole vanilla bean in his hand and smell it before taking a bite of a sweetened potato puree. The potato, he found, tasted like vanilla, though there was none cooked within. It was the residual oil on his hand, lingering in his nose while he ate, that perfumed the dish. “It was the first time that a chef ever, that I knew of, deliberately introduced a smell solely to flavor the dish,” Achatz told me. “And that was a moment for me.”