Pleasure Principle

In his new book, Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating, Charles Spence looks beyond the food on the plate to examine what makes a meal unforgettable.

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“Open wide!” she said, in her most seductive French accent, and so I did. And in it went. In that one moment, in that one movement, and in that one mouthful, I was taken back to the haziest memories of being spoon-fed as a baby (or at least my imagining of what that must have been like). That dish, or rather the way in which it was served, also foreshadowed what my last meals may well be like as the darkness draws in.

That mouthful of lime jelly at The Fat Duck in Bray many, many years ago was an incredibly powerful experience – shocking, disturbing even. But why? Well, I guess in part because no one had fed me that way, at least not in the past 45 years or so. Yet there I was, at what was soon to become the world’s top restaurant, being spoon-fed my three-Michelin-starred dinner. Well, one course of it, at least. Just enough to make the point that dining had become about much more than merely what we eat.

The pleasures of the table reside in the mind, not in the mouth. Cooking, no matter how exquisitely executed, can only take you so far. One needs to understand the role of “the everything else” to determine what really makes food and drink so enjoyable, stimulating and, most importantly, memorable. Even something as simple as biting into a fresh ripe peach turns out, on closer inspection, to be an incredibly complex multi sensory experience. Just think about it for a moment: your brain has to bind together the aromatic smell, the taste, the texture, the colour, the sound as your teeth bite through the juicy flesh, not to mention the furry feeling of the peach fuzz in your hand and mouth. All of these sensory cues, together with our memories, contribute much more than you would believe to the flavour itself. And it all comes together in your brain.