Chapter 6 — Further Reading

The chemistry, neuroscience, and culture of taste and smell sit at the intersection of food science, sensory neuroscience, and history. The list below is organized by depth.

Beginner

Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, 2nd ed. (Scribner, 2004), the chapters on flavor. McGee's treatment of the basic tastes, aromatics, and the overall architecture of flavor is the home cook's gateway. Approachable; well-illustrated; indexed.

Samin Nosrat, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking (Simon & Schuster, 2017), throughout. Nosrat's whole framing of cooking — salt for savor, fat for richness, acid for brightness, heat for transformation — is, in this chapter's vocabulary, a framework for thinking about how to manage taste components in dishes. The book is also a model of accessible food-science writing.

Niki Segnit, The Flavour Thesaurus: A Compendium of Pairings, Recipes, and Ideas for the Creative Cook (Bloomsbury, 2010). Segnit's compendium of empirical flavor pairings — what goes with what — is one of the most useful cookbooks of the last twenty years. Not heavy on chemistry, but rich in observation. Pair with the Belitz aroma-chemistry chapters if you want to ground her pairings in molecular reasoning.

Harold McGee, Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World's Smells (Penguin Press, 2020). McGee's book-length treatment of olfaction — written for general readers, but technically careful — is the single best place to deepen your understanding of smell after this chapter.

The Specialty Coffee Association's Flavor Wheel and the World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon (free online). Visual mappings of coffee aromatic compounds onto sensory descriptors. Useful for the coffee track and as a model of how the food industry organizes aroma vocabulary.

Intermediate

Gordon Shepherd, Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters (Columbia University Press, 2012). Shepherd, a neuroscientist who studies olfaction, makes the case that flavor is a brain construct (his term: "neurogastronomy"). Mid-level technical density; accessible to the curious non-specialist. The single most influential book on how cooking professionals now talk about flavor.

Ole G. Mouritsen and Klavs Styrbæk, Umami: Unlocking the Secrets of the Fifth Taste (Columbia University Press, 2014). A book-length treatment of umami, glutamate chemistry, and the cuisines that have built around umami delivery. Extensively illustrated and culturally generous.

Ole G. Mouritsen, Mouthfeel: How Texture Makes Taste (Columbia University Press, 2017). Mouritsen's follow-up on the role of texture in flavor — the side of "flavor" this chapter touches only briefly. Recommended if you are interested in why food's physical properties (crispness, creaminess, juiciness) matter.

Modernist Cuisine* (Myhrvold, Young, and Bilet — The Cooking Lab, 2011), Volume 1, the chapters on perception and flavor. The Modernist Cuisine treatment of taste and smell, with extensive photography and a discussion of flavor pairings. Library-worthy.

Heston Blumenthal, In Search of Total Perfection (Bloomsbury, 2009) and the Fat Duck Cookbook (Bloomsbury, 2008). Blumenthal's practical approach to flavor pairing, multisensory perception, and the chemistry behind unexpected combinations. A working chef's view of taste-and-smell as design materials.

Krish Ashok, Masala Lab: The Science of Indian Cooking (Penguin Random House India, 2020). Ashok's book on Indian cooking through a food-science lens includes excellent discussion of the umami, chemesthesis, and bitter-suppression strategies that traditional Indian cooking has long deployed. He is also a clear and direct communicator on the MSG question and its racial framing.

Advanced

Belitz, Grosch, and Schieberle, Food Chemistry, 5th ed. (Springer, 2009), Chapter 12 ("Aroma Compounds"). Graduate-level food chemistry. The reference for volatile-compound chemistry across food categories. Essential if you want the molecular detail.

Fennema's Food Chemistry, 5th ed., edited by Damodaran and Parkin (CRC Press, 2017), the aroma and taste chapters. The other graduate-level reference, complementary to Belitz.

Charles Spence, Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating (Viking, 2017). Spence is an Oxford psychologist who studies multisensory perception in eating. His research includes the famous "sonic chip" experiments (sound affects perceived crunchiness) and the role of plate color in taste perception. Approachable popular-science writing on a body of research that food scientists are increasingly engaging with.

Mary R. Beauchamp, "Why do we like what we like?" and related research papers from the Monell Chemical Senses Center (available via Google Scholar). Monell is the world's leading research institution on taste and smell. Their published research is the most rigorous source for current science on taste perception, including individual variation, supertasters, and the genetics of flavor preference.

Linda Bartoshuk, "Comparing sensory experiences across individuals: recent psychophysical advances illuminate genetic variation in taste perception" (Chemical Senses, 2000) — the foundational paper on supertaster status and genetic variation in taste sensitivity.

Andrea L. Roberts and others, "Olfactory dysfunction in patients with COVID-19" — multiple papers in JAMA Otolaryngology and similar journals 2020-2023. The peer-reviewed clinical research on post-COVID anosmia and parosmia. For the curious or for any cook working with parosmic clients.

Ikeda, Kikunae, "On a New Seasoning," translated from his 1909 Japanese paper, available in English in the Journal of the Chemical Society of Japan archives or in Mouritsen's Umami book. The original paper announcing the discovery of umami.

On the History of MSG and "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome"

The 2018 New England Journal of Medicine editor's note acknowledging the racist framing of the original 1968 letter (open access on the NEJM website).

Jennifer LeMesurier, "Race, Gender, and the Power of MSG" — academic articles on the racial framing of MSG fears.

Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food (Twelve, 2008). The book-length popular treatment of how Chinese-American food has been culturally framed in the United States, including a chapter on the MSG panic.

Asian-American food writers' contemporary commentary on MSG and umami: Lucas Sin (Junzi Kitchen), Krish Ashok, Bonnie Tsui, and others have written extensively in periodicals (Bon Appétit, Eater, The New York Times) on the legacy of the MSG framing. Search "MSG racism" and read recent (post-2018) coverage.

Online and Visual

The Food Lab columns at Serious Eats and Kenji's personal website (free, online). López-Alt's experimental treatments of seasoning, umami, and taste-balancing in everyday recipes. Reproducible and clear.

Adam Ragusea, multiple YouTube videos on flavor, aroma, and seasoning (free). Ragusea is the most reliable YouTube communicator of cooking science working today. His videos on umami, on why food tastes different at altitude, and on the architecture of flavor are pithy and well-cited.

The Monell Chemical Senses Center's public outreach materials (free, monell.org). Educational content from the world's leading taste-and-smell research institution. Free, accessible, scientifically careful.

Ricardo Maldonado and Joanna Norton, Salt-and-Pepper podcast and similar food-and-science podcasts (free). Audio-format discussions of taste perception, individual variation, and food culture.

A note on training your own senses

The most useful advice this chapter can offer is also the simplest: to taste better, taste more often and more deliberately. Slow down. Take small bites. Try to separate, in your head, what you taste from what you smell. Pinch your nose; chew; release; notice. Do this with strawberries, with tomatoes, with bread, with chocolate, with coffee, with anything. Within a few months of deliberate attention, your sense of taste will have sharpened more than it would in a lifetime of casual eating.

Smell training is also real. The four-odor protocol (rose, eucalyptus, lemon, clove, smelled deliberately twice a day) is the standard recommendation for olfactory recovery, but it works as a training tool for healthy noses too. People who practice attention to their own olfaction tend to develop sharper olfactory acuity than people who don't.

The food has been doing the chemistry the whole time. The variable is you. Improve the variable.