I like to smell things. I am one of those maddening people who pulls off little bits of leaf and twig from every passing bush while I’m walking with someone and tries to get them to smell all the resulting bits of mutilated herbage. I do not have a particularly keen or refined sense of smell, and I know absolutely nothing about wine, both of which facts tend to surprise people who know how much I like to cook. But I am happiest when I am moving in a smelly world, a fragrant, odiferous, stinky, redolent world, a world that smells of something.
I like the clouds of perfume that hang around the mock-orange trees in downtown Berkeley in summertime, so strong the scent is almost visible. I like to open the windows at 4am to breathe in the thick wonderful smog of Buenos Aires, heavy with cheap gasoline fumes and spiced roasting meat. I like the fresh-bread-and-old-urine scent of Paris in the early morning, the warm sweet musty breath of petrichor rising from the soil in Santa Fe after sudden rain, the dry sharp scent of sage and bayleaf in the California hills in fire season, which I used to call “that lizard smell” when I was small because there were always gray-green lizards scampering away over the rocks whenever I smelled it. I like the strange waxy mousy odor of old houses when their floorboards are settling in the slow hours of the afternoon.
I like bad smells, if they are not inescapable and they are part of some larger sense of place and time. They interest me – I like their suchness, their specificity. Sloshing through a marsh in pursuit of ducks, for example, and smelling the almost unbelievable stink of the gases which escape from the mud at every step, like the worst fart trapped in the smallest elevator: not a pleasant scent, certainly, but unique, intensely memorable, coupled forever in my memory with the slant of the light on the water and the subtle color of the swaying pickleweed.
It is almost a cliché to say that smells conjure up the past. More interesting, I think, is to contemplate the ways they tell the future. Think of the fragrance of young grass after rain, say, and how it heralds the coming of spring. Or else imagine being greeted by the redolent fumes of a long-simmering pasta sauce as you walk in the door: already your mouth is watering!
Smell tells us what’s ahead, both delicious and dangerous. To smell food before it reaches you is to know what your future holds. A heavy smell of grease, or the stale odor of old potatoes, suggests that you should steel yourself for the assault on your digestion. The fine fragrance of onions, burnt sugar, fresh basil, on the other hand, tell you that everything is almost certainly going to be all right. One might say (I might say) that a good smell is a flirtation. It is a sly wink at the pleasures to come, a sort of gustatory foreplay.
A kitchen that doesn’t smell of anything, on the other hand, is worrying, because you don’t know how to mentally prepare yourself for what comes out of it. It is like going on a first date with someone who keeps texting you that they’ll be there in fifteen minutes. This experience is worst in restaurants, where there isn’t even a bookshelf to peruse to keep your mind occupied. When I find myself in a restaurant where I can’t smell the kitchen, I am filled with a twitchy impatience. I cannot properly anticipate the meal to come; the pleasurable contemplation of forthcoming delights is lost, unless there are a lot of people at nearby tables being served things I can stare at, at least until they become uncomfortable and start shielding their plates with their arms.
I fiddle with things on the table. I chew my lips. I look desperately at the bottom of my glass. Soon I find myself feeling the same ambivalence that used to come over me in bars in my early twenties when faced with especially clueless men: oh dear, why did I think this was going to be fun? or can I possibly have come to the right place? and finally, Say, how long is this going to take, anyway? This minor panic in the context of a restaurant leads to the tinge of frantic anger known colloquially as being hangry, which, if left unchecked, can wind up with me eating not only all the breadsticks but also the sugar packets, the butter pats, any paper napkins that seem potentially digestible, and finally my own fingers.
But no matter how grouchy I am, a delicious aroma serves as a kind of tantalizing appetizer. It distracts and soothes me long enough to pass the time until the food itself arrives, and inspires rich topics of conversation – such as, say, how excited we are to eat, how wonderful eating is, how happy we will be when we have eaten, and where we should go for dessert.
Smell, in other words, can make us believe that something good is coming our way. This does not need to be literal; in fact, some smells evoke such a sense of impending gladness that their effect can be practically religious. The fragrance of baking bread, for example, is so evocative that the smell itself – quite apart from the bread – has become its own poetic symbol of spiritual well-being. This seems like a tired and abused cliché until you actually try baking bread, at which point you, too, will discover the actual mystical effect of smelling it.
I used to feel irritated by all the heavy-handed descriptions of the enchanting smell. I swore up and down that I would never be guilty of such overburdened adjectives. And then I went off and baked my first loaf or two, and learned that it really does produce a golden smell, fundamentally good, the olfactory equivalent of a nap in the sun on a sleepy afternoon with the bees buzzing in the lavender. And I found to my chagrin that I had no choice but to resort to completely hackneyed language to try and describe it. (There’s nothing to be done about this; it can’t be avoided. Only an exceptional poet can talk about such things without sounding goofy, and there are far more good bakers than there are good poets.)
Some bad smells, of course, are equally evocative, and can promise danger or dismay as surely as the smell of baking bread promises happiness to come. I will leave a discourse on disgusting smells for another essay, however, and merely note that perfumery is one of the ancient arts for a reason. Anyway, all this perhaps goes some way towards elucidating the fact that in the weeks since our house blew up, both D. and I have found ourselves going frequently into fragrance shops like The Ministry of Scent in San Francisco and sampling fine perfumes until our noses burned.
Now, I should explain that I am not a fragrance person. I grew up with parents who winced at synthetic smells, and in my teenage years I was never allowed to dab more than an occasional bit of essential oil behind my ears. Scented lotions give me eczema, and as an adult I went from using the mild herby Toms of Maine-type deodorants to the completely scentless kind that looks like a well-polished chunk of rock salt. I use shampoos that smell faintly of rosemary, and pure olive oil for a moisturizer. In general, I suppose, I mostly smell like the more inoffensive sort of healthfood store. Until last month, the only perfume I owned was a gift from D. A girl in his high school drama class used to wear it, and to track it down he had to call her up to find out what it was even though they hadn’t spoken in fifteen years. This is the kind of awkward social interaction I myself would probably only agree to in exchange for a really spectacular ceviche recipe. But he really loves the scent, so I went to Macy’s in Union Square with him to buy it.
This was, I must clarify, an act of true love, since Macy’s in Union Square terrifies me. It is filled with incredibly menacing mannequins, and I feel certain that at any moment all the doors will slam shut and I will be locked in while hordes of plastic children in Easter dresses chases me up and down the escalators. It also smells like my idea of hell, which is to say a mixture of Tide pods, the duty-free perfume counter at an international airport, and a Yankee Candle factory.
The perfume we were buying comes in a bottle shaped like a large lopsided baby-blue glass star, which is inexplicably designed to not stand upright on any surface. Also, it is called Angel. As other children of the 1990s will understand, my chief association with the word “angel” in the context of baby-blue products for female-identified people is the fact that when I was in middle school it was commonly printed on belly-baring tshirts, usually in a curly font with little cartoon wings on either side. (Alternatively, you could buy red t-shirts with “No Angel” printed on them instead, with little devil horns instead of the little wings. Girls wore these shirts with flared jeans and skate shoes, which we made fatter for some reason by shoving socks under the tongue of the shoe. The effect was embarrassing for everyone.)
The smell is pleasant enough, and I sometimes wear it when we go dancing, but I have to admit that I don’t find it especially evocative of anything except perfume. Actually, many perfumes don’t evoke much for me except other perfumes. Indeed, it was my general understanding that perfume was what perfume was supposed to smell like. (You don’t sniff Chanel No. 5 and think “Ah, yes, bergamot”; you think “oh, that’s Chanel No. 5”.) Recently, however, I have learned that I am wrong about this. Some fragrances are very much designed to evoke something other than, say, a vague impression of wealth. For example – and, of course, most interesting to me – is the entire family of scent known as the gourmands. These are, quite simply, scents which smell like something you want to eat.
Normal perfume counters don’t seem to stock them, probably out of the fear that they will inspire precisely the kind of cannibalistic orgy I’m always afraid is about to take place in malls. Finding gourmand perfumes seems to require you to locate the kind of small, discreet, dedicated shop that is exclusively staffed by highly knowledgeable, languorous, and gently sardonic people who all smell really, really interesting. Once there, instead of sniffing things that smell like overpriced floral arrangements and men’s underwear advertisements, you can safely sample things that make you want to lick your wrists.
Gourmand scents, I have learned, can smell exactly like masala chai, or hot buttered popcorn in the lobby of an Art Nouveau movie theater. You sniff the tester strip and find yourself seized with the burning desire to run into the nearest pastry shop and buy everything in sight. These scents do what I’ve always wished perfumes would do, which is to conjure up a highly specific and delicious vision. I don’t identify as a day at the beach or a little black dress. I don’t want someone to sniff my neck and think of a quasi-Orientalist boudoir. I want people who smell me to instantly crave a delicious snack. (Admittedly I did try one that smelled so exactly like a good panettone – it was called, imaginatively, “Panettone” – that I had to put it back on the shelf; I’m not quite old enough yet to want to smell like even the best Italian fruitcake.)
I have since learned that Angel is actually considered the first modern gourmand scent, but it doesn’t smell edible to me. Like most perfumes you can buy in a Macy’s, it smells like something sandwiched between the pages of Vanity Fair. The perfume D. got for me at Ministry of Scent, on the other hand, makes me smell like cardamom biscotti. (It’s called “Sweetly Known,” from a designer called Kerosene, who also makes a perfume that smells like an empty lot full of late-summer California weeds and wild fennel – a much weirder scent, but still fairly edible, in a picking-dubiously-dusty-blackberries-by-the-side-of-the-road kind of way.)
Perhaps it’s odd that we stumbled into an extravagant perfume shop only after losing everything we owned, but there’s something sort of marvelous about owning a bottle of really nice scent and almost nothing else. I feel slightly guilty about this, since I am acutely aware that most people who are displaced due to disasters do not have this luxury. The fact that we lost our house and everything in it without losing the financial stability required to buy heavy glass bottles of what used to be called “toilet water” continues to unsettle me. But the fact remains that it is deeply comforting to smell better than I’ve ever smelled before at exactly the moment when I have the fewest things of my own. So much of what I usually look forward to is temporarily wholly unavailable: I love to cook for people, but I can’t invite anyone over to dinner; I am comforted by cookbooks, but my library is so much pulp; dancing gives me joy, but my tango clothes are buried under a heap of fiberglass. And yet – I smell delicious. I catch little drifts of the scent, and it tells me that something wonderful is possible.
I like to smell something cooking, said Julia Child, it makes me feel at home. I like to smell things, I suppose, because smell puts me right here in the world. It tells me I am really alive, and joy has not yet vanished from the realm of possibility. When I smell something delicious[1], home seems less a matter of having my own roof, and more a matter of having my own body, a body to which marvelous things can still happen. A good smell can make me feel like my body itself is a good place to be.
If you find yourself in need of a smell to gladden your heart, make you feel at home, and remind you that existence is not always awful, and a bottle of fine perfume is currently unobtainable, I suggest you try the following recipe for actual cardamom biscotti. It comes via a dear friend who is a very accomplished baker and fellow perfume enthusiast, from the blog boisdejasmin.com. I have tinkered with it only slightly.
CARDAMOM & ORANGE BISCOTTI
Ingredients
2 scant cups all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar (I usually use brown)
½ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons butter, softened
3 large eggs + 1 more for glazing
Zest of a large orange or large handful chopped candied orange peel
1 teaspoon ground cardamom seeds (more work to grind your own, but much better!)
¾ teaspoon almond extract
1 cup almonds, toasted and choppedMethod
Preheat the oven to 375ºF. Stir the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt together in a large bowl and rub the butter into the flour with your fingers until the mixture looks grainy. Beat the eggs lightly in a small bowl. Mix the orange zest or peel, cardamom, and almond extract into the flour mixture, and add about 2/3rds of the beaten egg. Mix until the dough starts forming, adding more egg as needed to bring it all together into a rough lump. (You may or may not need all the egg – if you don’t, reserve the rest for glazing.) The dough should be soft and pliable and slightly tacky; try not to overwork it.
Now add the nuts and work them gently in. When the nuts are incorporated into the dough and it’s all one slightly sticky mass, line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Divide the dough in half and shape each half into a rough log, maybe 8-12” long. Place the logs on the baking sheet a few inches apart and pat them gently down into two long domed mounds. Brush the logs with the last of the egg (you may need to use an extra).
Bake the logs until golden brown, 20-25 minutes, then remove the baking sheet from the oven and place it on a heat-proof surface. With a sharp knife, cut the logs into diagonal slices about an inch wide, and lay out the slices on their flat sides all over the baking sheet. Turn the heat down to 325ºF and bake another 10-15 minutes, until the side facing up is browning, then flip them over and repeat another 10-15 minutes. They should be firm and golden on both sides.
The biscotti will dry out as it cools, and it keeps very well. Try other flavors – rose & pistachio, perhaps, or hazelnut & lemon, or chocolate & walnut.
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[1] In the film Wings of Desire, when Bruno Ganz’s angel becomes human, his very first act as an incarnate being is to buy a cup of coffee. First he puts his nose into the cup and smells it. Then he takes a sip. The radiance of his expression as he does this always makes me cry a little, because it’s probably the purest celebration of complete pleasure that’s ever been put on film. It says that having a body which can smell coffee is the best thing imaginable, a joy for which immortality is worth sacrificing. When I see his face (and, it’s worth saying, when I smell my own coffee on a good morning) I, too, believe this completely.