The Cook Who Tasted Nothing

A chef of some reputation in a small city lost, in the winter of her forty-second year, her sense of taste. It happened over the course of a bad week and a worse infection, and it did not, as the doctors had gently warned her, return. She was, in the space of ten days, a professional cook who could not taste her own food. She spent a fortnight in bed, then a month cancelling reservations, then, for reasons she could not fully explain, went back to the kitchen.

For the first six months she cooked with an assistant beside her whose only job was to taste. It was miserable. She hated needing someone. She hated the small delay while the assistant considered. She hated, most of all, the growing suspicion that she had never really trusted her own palate as much as she had trusted her memory of it. Somewhere in the seventh month she realised she was no longer running her kitchen. She was running her memory of her kitchen.

She began, that month, to cook by every sense except taste. She listened to onions. She had never realised how much information was in the sound of an onion in oil; there was, she now heard, a precise moment when the pitch dropped that told her more than any thermometer. She watched fat behave in a pan and learned the small trembling that came just before smoking. She smelled a stock and could tell within ten seconds whether it was under-salted, because the aromatic compounds behaved differently when the salt was low. She touched pasta and learned the exact springiness that meant it was one minute from done.

The strange thing — she would say this in interviews for years afterwards — was that her food, by the second year, was better. Not equal-to-before-adjusted-for-difficulty better. Actually better. Reviewers who did not know about her condition wrote that her cooking had gained a new precision. Old customers said dishes she had made for twenty years suddenly tasted more like themselves. She had, in losing her most trusted sense, been forced to develop four others past the level any of her colleagues bothered with, and the compound effect was a kind of cooking that no cook with a working palate had time to learn.

There is a version of this in every constrained life. When one channel closes, the others, given a few years of forced attention, become dramatically more sensitive than they were when the closed channel was doing all the work. The loss is real. The compensating growth is also real, and it is usually larger than the person going through the loss can imagine at the time.

She never told anyone she was grateful for what had happened to her. She was not. She was, however, honest enough to say, at a small dinner near the end of her life, that she was not sure she would have become a great cook if she had kept her palate. She had, until the illness, been merely a talented one. The kitchen, she said, had taught her something the palate had been quietly preventing it from teaching her: that most of cooking is not tasting at all.