A COMEDY OF ERRORS.
While thus admitting the gastronomic and therapeutic value of bitters, I must nevertheless call attention to the fact that their allurements, as mere sensations of taste, are not considerable. We would not care so much for Scotch marmalade as we do were it not for the pungent fragrance of the Seville orange which accompanies its bitter taste; or for the bitter grapefruit were it not so highly perfumed. Hops are valued for their tonic bitter but still more for their agreeable odor, without which beer, for instance, is a flat failure. We never eat quinine for fun, because it has no fragrance to modify its intense bitter; nor, for the same reason, would we use strychnine as a condiment even though it were as harmless as sugar.
Now, what is true of bitter, is true also of all other sensations of taste—salt, sour, and sweet. Considered as mere sensations of taste they have no great gastronomic value—not great at any rate when compared with the sensations of smell. On this point I need not dwell, as I discussed it briefly in Chapter II under the headings of "An Amazing Blunder" and "A New Psychology of Eating," in which I pointed out that there is only one unvarying kind of sour and one unvarying kind of sweet and that all the varied and countless pleasures of the table are due chiefly to the sense of smell which enables us to enjoy them if we breathe out through the nose while munching our food.
To this day it seems almost incredible that it should have remained for me to make this extremely important discovery; yet all my researches have failed to bring to light a psychologist who anticipated me. My surprise abated somewhat at the time when the theory was first announced that mosquitoes are responsible for malaria. Having just read Humboldt's travels in South America and Stanley's "Darkest Africa," I remembered that both of these writers had come within an inch of the truth, yet missed it completely. The case of Stanley is really comic. Emin Pasha had informed him that he "always took a mosquito curtain with him, as he believed that it was an excellent protector against miasmatic exhalations of the night." Now, how in the world could these "miasmatic exhalations" (which were held responsible for malaria) have been kept out by a mosquito net when, as Stanley does not fail to note, the same air "enters by the doors of the house and under the flaps and through ventilators to poison the inmates"?
Just as in this case the fixed idea that bad air (malaria) must be responsible for the disease obscured the truth, so the undeserved homage bestowed on the sense of taste blinded those who wrote on this subject, including Brillat-Savarin.
In his "Physiology of Taste" he has a chapter on the senses in which he beats around the bush in the most ridiculous way. He knew that if you have a cold, or hold your nose while eating, "no flavor is perceived in anything that is swallowed"; yet from this he inferred that "all sense of taste is obliterated," although the simplest experiment would have shown him that a cold does not affect the sensations of sweet, sour, salt, bitter, alkaline, or metallic in the least; and after several pages of argumentation he comes to the absurd conclusion that "there is no complete perception of taste unless the sense of smell have a share in the sensation," and that, in fact, "smell and taste form only one sense, having the mouth as laboratory with the nose for fireplace or chimney." You might as well say that sight and hearing form only one sense.
Dr. Charles Henry Piesse, member of the Royal College of Surgeons, is another author who came within half an inch of the truth, yet missed it. He wrote a little volume, "Olfactics and the Physical Senses," which is full of interesting facts and suggestions. Two citations, the first from "The Art of Perfumery," written by Dr. Piesse's father, the second from "Olfactics," will show "how warm" these two men got in their search, as the children say in their play.
To the unlearned nose all odors are alike; but when tutored, either for pleasure or profit, no member of the body is more sensitive. Wine merchants, tea brokers, drug dealers, tobacco importers, and many others, have to go through a regular educational nasal course. A hop merchant buries his nose in a pocket, takes a sniff, and then sets his price upon the bitter flower.
The odors have to be remembered, and it is noteworthy here to remark with what persistence odors do fix themselves upon the memory; and were it not for this remembrance of an odor, the merchants in the trades above indicated would soon be at fault. An experienced perfumer will have two hundred odors in his laboratory, and can distinguish every one by name.
When the breath is held the most odorous substances may be spread in the interior of the nostrils without their perfume being perceived. This observation was first made by Galen. It has been frequently remarked that odors are smelt only during inspiration; the same air, when returned through the nostrils, always proving inodorous. But this is true only when the odor has been admitted from without by the nostrils, for when it is admitted by the mouth, as in combination with articles of nutrition, it can be perceived during expiration through the nose.
Yet this man, who thus came so near the truth, missed it as widely as all the others! Throughout his books he talks as if taste were "it." The number of "different tastes, or flavors" is, "of course, unlimited," he says; whereas, let me say it once more, there are only six tastes: sweet, salt, sour, bitter, metallic and alkaline. Again, he remarks that "the importance of possessing a pure and cultivated sense of taste is very great in certain trades and professions, as, for instance, the occupation of a wine-taster, a tea-taster, a coffee-taster. These persons are all gourmets; the word gourmet signifying a taster." Wrong, from beginning to end. Coffee, tea, and wine "tasters"—the men who sample these articles to adjudge their commercial value—are guided entirely by their Flavor, that is, their appeal to the sense of smell; while epicures owe nine-tenths of their enjoyment of food to that sense and only one-tenth to the sense of taste.
Even Professor Dr. Gustav Jäger, the famous apostle of "all-wool for man's wear," missed the mark. He wrote a book, "Die Entdeckung der Seele," in which he tried to prove that smell is really the most important of our senses, the olfactory nerve being in fact the seat of the soul! Yet this ardent advocate entirely failed to see the truth I have set forth in this book—the fact that to the sense of smell we owe most of the countless pleasures of the table, with all their important digestive and hygienic consequences. Just like all the other misguided writers on this subject, he speaks of differences in taste between lobster and crawfish, or between the eggs of hens, ducks, geese, and so on, although it is the nose and not the tongue that enables us to tell them apart.