A (biased) history of flavours

From cooking for survival to developing a cuisine, from edibility to indulgence, from wellness to nostalgia, Madhulika Dash tells us all about how the concept of taste changed and evolved over the years

A few years ago, a popular dairy startup decided to base its new range of milkshakes on the high-riding trend of curcumin — the super-healthy element found in turmeric. The new product combined the best of two worlds: the age-old, proven track record of a glass of haldi wala doodh (today popular as golden milk or turmeric latte) and the popularity of milkshake, especially when introduced in the popular flavours of chocolate, strawberry and mango. Cosseted in interesting packaging and branding, the product was set for success. Only it didn’t make the cut.

So why did a product that ticked all boxes of flavours, fragrance, and trends lose? The cause was the trademark yellow colour of the milkshake irrespective of the flavour one picked. The thing about taste today, at least the concept of it, is not just restricted to the mouthfeel only but must score equally on the looks as well, especially with what the guest associates with. That ‘association’ today is heavily about what the flavour industry has managed to key in through years of colour coordination and product imagery. The result, anything made of a certain ingredient has to correspond with the shade card decided for it. Anything that is made of strawberry is pink, chocolate is brown, butterscotch is a light shade of pastel yellow, and so on and so forth. Likewise for fresh food as well. While that association today has been the key that enables us to navigate the food landscape safely, regardless of the location or cuisine, on the one hand, it has also laid the dos and don’ts of how food works globally — be it in the commercial kitchen or food factory. Deviate from the set path and the product has a fate similar to the milkshake with a few exceptions.

Why does this happen? After all, food has always been about being edible and tasting good. Not today. Our concept of taste or flavour — which unfortunately is used interchangeably often — is largely the privileged target of memory in the brain, specifically dictated by a part called the Hippocampus. It is this part of the brain that holds all forms of long and short-term, declarative food memories. In fact, it functions much like our reflexes where each time you bite into something, it releases a chapter that dictates whether you should eat it or not, and even like it or not. The reason behind this is that Hippocampus, according to gastrophysics, controls hormones that regulate appetite, digestion, and eating behaviour, and thus has a significant role when it comes to acceptance of food, and the correspondent ‘feed or flight reaction’. In other words, if you have not liked a dish by its taste or appearance, it is this autobiographical reflex at work. In fact, most of our taste concepts that involve that look, the texture, the mouthfeel, and the discovery of that familiar note are often the work of the memory of taste rather than what the taste buds perceive it to be. That’s one of the reasons that food through the past few centuries adopted local flavours by chefs and food companies and why most innovation in the commercial kitchen and elsewhere often toes the line of the familiar or nostalgia.

Fascinatingly, though, when it comes to the history of flavours and taste, eating and recognising by memory has been a part of evolution, and was rather absent in the early years of civilisation, and by that one doesn’t mean the Indus Valley or Mohenjo Daro, during which time distillation was commonplace, but the Paleolithic age where fire contributed to humans developing a taste for cooked food. It tasted better courtesy of Maillard’s reaction that lends meat its distinct brown hue and deliciousness. The reason for this according to paleoanthropologists was our advanced sense of smell and taste that was almost animal-like, and a clean memory. So whatever we ate and discarded became the first notes. The heightened smell and palate also gave us the power to distinguish good from bad based on whether we liked it, did it change with fire, and whether we were alive.

Those were the first notes that became a part of the sensory side, and its continued practice through the ages gave it the memory privilege. It is this in-built memory that comes to play when we must decide whether a food has gone bad or not, or even while foraging for food, especially for mushrooms and berries. A strong indicator of the flight mode is bitter — a flavour that instantly repulses us from anything, and this includes fermented food as well unless there is a familiar note to it. That familiar note in fact was a crucial skill that further developed during the Neolithic era when we began growing food. This, while limiting our dependency on finding food, is believed to be the start of when both cooking food and food itself started developing as a cuisine. With food losing its “for survival” tag, flavours took centre stage with aspects such as pairing two ingredients like meat and veggies, using pots for cooking or adding a fragrant element to make it more appealing, playing a key role in its making. The need to have food that felt good to the nose and taste buds became a staple practice which led to the finding of new techniques for doing so; the other aspect was repurposing surplus or those with a short shelf life. Fascinatingly, the dual purpose would for eras be the force that drove not just food habits but build on what today defines taste and flavour. Whether it was the Roman use of Garum, a fermented fish sauce that became Europe’s finest tastemaker and currently an obsession for those in Noma; the Chinese yin and yang of food that brought to the fore the fine technique of combining flavours, the use of fragrance or ittar in Middle East on which the world of perfumes and processed food score on; the Egyptian knack of turning fruit into a heady beverage and South East Asia’s ke-chiap that led to the invention of ketchup or tomato sauce, one of the most recognised condiments that add familiarity to any food, and thus the acceptance.

In India, the context of the evolution of taste, however, took a more scientific approach to Rasa, in which the ingredients including spices, herbs and later fragrance extracted through steaming, were treated as an integral part of the dish. The result, Indian food had the five elements that today define taste — sweet, salt, sour, bitter, and umami. In fact, the idea of taste creation in Indian dishes did more than just have a balance of all these elements, it was about a concept called tripti that led to the creation of spice blends and the notion of tempering or chhonk, which worked the science of using the sensors on the tongue to conceptualise the idea of tasty or yum. The chhonk curiously back in the day wasn’t just about tempering in oil but finishing a dish with either a fragrant spice mix that became garam masala or adding hing or sugar/khand/jaggery, which during the Indus Valley Civilisation was a commonly used flavour for savoury dishes as well. So yes, sugar in dal is that old trick that finds mention in cookbooks like Paka Darpana, a book written by history’s first Masterchef King Nala who has defined the way spices and herbs can be blended and incorporated into a dish for maximum impact and later in Sultan Ghiyath Shahi’s curated The Sultan’s Book of Delight, where the connoisseur brought together not just the two culinary worlds of India and Middle East to add fragrance to the memory mix but also the way a dish should look and feel even before the first bite.

It is on this format that our collective memory and most of our culinary evolution and changing taste concepts are based on.

(The author is a seasoned food columnist and curator of experiential dining experiences, pop-ups and retreats for chefs.)