Bianca Bosker's Reading List

"You’re in for a treat. Like that famous Churchill quote that “history is written by the victors,” history is actually also written by the visualists. We rely so much on the eyewitness, the first-hand observer. There’s a bias in favour of defining history by what can be seen. What we lose—and what Corbin’s book provides—is a historical account that relies on all five of the senses, and especially olfaction. It looks at the way that smell has played a powerful role in the evolution of science, in the evolution of cities, in class identities and in politics and in sanitation. “Versailles used to be a cesspool: it smelt of urine and dead cats” He explores, for example, why Europeans refused to wash, then how they learned to shower. Once upon time, people assumed they could cleanse themselves by sweating. The Foul and the Fragrant is also an absolute delight to read. It is one of the most carnal books I’ve ever read. It is messy and it is disgusting, and, as a result, it is a joy. Smell is usually very difficult to translate into words, but Corbin does a phenomenal job. We hear about “morbific vapours” and decaying cheese that is “acidocacious”, the smells of blood and bones and burning. We fail to realize how deodorized modern life is, and Corbin reminds us, telling us about the dizzying stench of cities with their sewers, slaughterhouses, you name it. Versailles, which we now think of as this Eden, used to be a cesspool: it smelt of urine and dead cats. They were roasting pork and slaughtering things right outside the palace. Corbin is a historian, so he draws on a lot of firsthand descriptions from writers and intellectuals and scientists working at the time. It doesn’t sound like they got too used to the smell of raw sewage flowing through the streets of Paris. Yes. Part of what intrigues me is the fact that we’ve lost those specific stinks. We have preserved the buildings from that period of time, we have streets that date back hundreds of years, but the olfactory signature of a place disappears, especially in the present day, when we’ve become obsessed with deodorising the spaces that we occupy, and ourselves. Don’t get me wrong: I’m grateful that cities don’t smell like sewers. But this book sheds light on the fact that this progression is not inevitable. And it’s also a reminder to pay attention to the sensory richness that we might be losing, rather than just getting rid of odours before we’ve even stopped to savour or recognise them."

"As a journalist I enjoy reading books that get me as close as possible to first-hand sources of information. I’ll definitely admit to a bias on this list towards researchers and academics, and I think part of that is because these writers have very intimate relationships with primary sources, and are generous in sharing them. These books are also great starting points for inspiration that’ll send you down even deeper rabbit holes. Like Corbin’s book, Aroma is one of the rare histories that emphasize smell, but it is far more expansive in scope than Corbin’s volume. The authors’ contention is essentially that smell has been silenced in modernity, and the book is an attempt to break this olfactory silence, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphors. “History has underappreciated the very physical, carnal, bodily experience” It’s a crash course in the changing notions around smell over time, and at the same time, it’s this really delightful journey through these lost odours. They write about the scent of the most famous perfume of Ancient Egypt , and my god what I wouldn’t give for a whiff of that! I’m so curious. Again, we can see the pyramids, but we have so little information about what life smelt like and what life tasted like. Maybe it’s because we have traditionally elevated and valued other senses above the more physical senses of taste and smell. History has underappreciated the very physical, carnal, bodily experience. I love these books, and this one, in particular, for remedying that. Because they’ve had a far more powerful effect on why we do things the way we do than we realise. In The Foul and the Fragrant, for example, we see the way that urban planning and the shape of cities were decided in no small part because of stench. You see it in New York as well: The banishment of factories out to deep parts of Brooklyn, and displacement of slaughterhouses to the edges of Manhattan was determined by odours. Because we live in these more deodorised environments, we don’t realise that the way things are today – literally including the shape of the streets – relates, in no small part, to smell. In another example, we tend to view smelling as rude. It’s rude to remark on what you notice about your friend’s body aroma. It’s rude to sniff yourself, or your food, or anything, because it implies there’s something wrong. Because I now embrace this very olfactory-focused mindset, when I go out to eat sushi, I sniff every piece. I’m always wondering if the chef takes it as an insult. Does he think that I’m checking the fish to see if it’s fresh? Because really, I’m just trying to deepen the pleasure of that bite. “Urban planning and the shape of cities were decided in no small part because of stench” This perception that smelling things and each other is impolite was a very deliberate shift brought about because of class upheavals, politics, and religion. It wasn’t an accident. That book Aroma argues that smell became threatening at some point. I should add there was also this elevation of sight over smell. If you think about it, when we see one other, we engage with each other’s exteriors, but smell reflects the interior self. It’s something that we guard a little more closely, that we haven’t decided to share with the world. So, the authors make this argument that smell became threatening because it was seen as more personal and more revealing, in a way that was not deliberate. To summarise, I think that taste and smell are so inextricably bound up with cultural practices, and even physical landscapes, that to ignore them means robbing ourselves of a much deeper understanding of how and why we live the way that we do."

"I’m cribbing here a little bit, but I think it’s a great description: it is a grand tour of the senses with Diane Ackerman playing tour guide. It’s not a narrative, it’s really more of a highlight reel of interesting observations and colourful stories about the senses. Just as an example, she writes about how Napoleon asked Joséphine not to bathe for two weeks before he saw her because he wanted to relish her full personal odour. She writes about how Victorian lovers, as a token of their affection, would rub apples under their armpits and exchange them to share their sweat-smell with one another. It’s little things like that that stick with you. I find it to be a haunting book in the sense that I’ll be going about my daily routine and then suddenly have these little flashbacks to observations that she made. She takes you to places that you can’t help but return to over and over again, that make you think a little bit differently. It doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive, but it’s a very pleasurable little tour. Absolutely. I think we each have our own terroir. For sure. This process of embracing these forgotten senses has completely transformed my experience of the world. That’s manifest in everything from relishing these momentary escapes into beauty, to picking up on nuances about the rhythm of the block where I live in New York. It’s funny, I have recently noticed that I’m also much more sensitive to smells than I used to be, in a way that is sometimes a liability. If I get into a car that smells very strongly, it’s very hard for me. This is a bit personal, but speaking of the smells of people, I think that we’re so attuned to our own smells that we can’t smell ourselves, but recently I have been able to smell myself. It is a mindfuck. It is so weird, and I haven’t yet figured out why it’s happening. I don’t know if I’m using a different combination of shampoo or conditioner, or if it’s something about the way I’m washing my clothes. It’s become a mystery. It’s funny that you asked that because I do think that, in the same way that you judge a wine because of its smell, I see people a little bit differently because of their smells. The effect of training my senses is similar to having spent years in a foreign country without knowing the language and then suddenly being able to understand the conversations going on around you. When you finally learn the language, you realize how much you’ve been missing. I even take pleasure from bad odours. I think that being able to distinguish that the smell of the subway on a given day is unwashed human rather than stale urine actually does add something to my life, as dubious as that sounds. Yes, totally, and it makes memories sharper. Being able to put language to a particular odour is a very powerful thing. It allows you to immerse yourself in an experience in a much deeper way."

"I would say Taste What You’re Missing is a much needed user manual on our own senses. Barb Stuckey is a food inventor who works for the lab Mattson, which creates potato chips and cookies and condiments for different food manufacturers. This book is a very science -heavy approach to the care, keeping and savouring of your senses. “We are really multisensory creatures, so all of our senses are acting on the others” It has everything from exercises that you can do to understand retro-nasal olfaction or become attuned to acidity on your tongue, to these explanations of why we perceive the world the way that we do. Going back to what we were talking about before, I think she does a very good job of diving into how we are really multisensory creatures, so all of our senses are acting on the others. I think the payoff of the book is instantaneous. Both, for sure. I think that the senses are our filter of the world. Stuckey’s book makes us understand the limitations and potential of those filters, so we can understand how we can get more out of life, why we pick up on what we pick up on, and how we are biased and influenced in ways that we don’t realise. I would say this is the manual on our senses that we always needed but may never have taken the time to read."

"Despite the title, she does deal with all five of the senses. What she lays out very effectively and persuasively is the origins of our denigration of taste and smell and our celebration of the other senses. She traces the philosophical roots of our bias against these chemical senses. She fingers Plato and Aristotle as being the ones that started the whole thing. And the reasons for the denigration of the senses have changed over time. With the rise of Christianity, for example, there was also the idea that smells were savage and appealed to our baser instincts. This is also similar to the arguments offered by Plato. Plato describes our tastes and smells and appetites as the savage beast chained up with man. I will say that this book deals not only with taste, in the sensory sense, but also taste, in the aesthetic sense. On that topic, it also looks at how gustatory and olfactory experiences became incompatible with higher art and these spiritually elevating artistic experiences. So, what I found so powerful about her book was the way that it picks apart the origins of our ‘visualist’ nature and the origins of our biases against some of the senses. I found that very helpful because it holds a mirror up to ourselves. It illuminates biases of which we are not even aware, and suggests that there may be an alternate way of seeing the world that doesn’t put taste and smell at the bottom of the totem pole and that doesn’t suggest an aria or a painting is always more refined and elevating than a bite of food. That’s a very difficult question. It’s a question that’s hard to do justice to in just a brief moment. As one of my sommelier mentors said: There are wines that can make you feel small in the way that a piece of music or a painting does. I’ve been lucky enough to have some of those bottles. There are things like old champagne that have stopped me in my tracks and made me think a little bit differently about the universe and my place in it. And I have heard pieces of music that have done the same thing. So, it’s not impossible to find the Bach of wine. And I should say that I would love to be on that journey. If someone wants me to find the Bach or Mozart of wine, then I’m game."