Taste Memory and Working on a Text

The evolution of the word “real”

Jurafsky shows how “real” works like a time machine, reflecting consumers’ fears in different periods. Restaurants write “real” when a popular, inexpensive imitation appears on the market:

• The 1900s: “real turtle”, rather than soup made from calves’ heads, and “genuine German beer”.

• The 1930s–40s: “genuine calf’s liver”.

• The 1960s: “real butter”—fear of margarine.

• The 1970s–80s: “real whipped cream”—fear of chemical substitutes.

• The 1990s: “real bacon”, rather than bacon-flavoured soya pieces.

Today, “real” remains only in inexpensive establishments—real mashed potatoes—and mid-range ones—real crab rather than crab sticks.

The mystery of “entrée”

In the second chapter, the author turns to a new linguistic puzzle. The French word entrée translates as “entrance”.

• In France and Britain, it logically means a starter: the entrance to the meal.

• In the United States, for some reason, it came to mean the main course.

Jurafsky is about to reveal the historical reason why Americans “broke” the word’s meaning.

[LITERARY SOURCES AND STUDY COMMENTARY. The following examples retain the authors and works named in the manuscript. The first person within quoted or translated passages belongs to the narrators of those works. Editions, pages and translations require bibliographic verification.]

Memoir writing—“Proustian moments”

Memoir writing is defined by “Proustian moments”: moments when we take a bite of food and are transported to another time and place. The term comes from a passage in Marcel Proust’s epic novel In Search of Lost Time, published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927.

Many years had passed during which nothing of Combray existed for me except what was connected with the theatre and drama of my going to bed, until one winter’s day, when I returned home, my mother saw that I was cold and offered me tea, a drink I did not usually take. At first I refused, but then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those short, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they have been moulded in the fluted shell of a pilgrim. Soon, mechanically, weary from a dull day and the prospect of a dreary tomorrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of tea in which I had soaked a piece of cake. The instant the warm liquid and crumbs touched my palate, a shiver ran through my whole body, and I stopped, astonished by the extraordinary changes taking place within me.

An exquisite pleasure filled my senses, separate and detached, with no hint of its origin. At once, the vicissitudes of life became indifferent to me, its disasters harmless, its brevity illusory. This new sensation had the same effect on me as love—or rather, its essence was within me: it was myself.

I ceased to feel mediocre, accidental or mortal. Where could this all-powerful joy have come from? I understood that it was connected with the taste of the tea and cake, yet it infinitely surpassed them. Where had it come from? What did it mean? How could I grasp and define it?

Today’s great chefs understand the power of the Proust phenomenon very well. They know that the most expensive caviar will not stir a guest’s emotions as strongly as a suddenly rekindled memory of a carefree childhood. This direction in fine dining is often called “emotional gastronomy”.

Here are two remarkable examples of how restaurants with three Michelin stars deliberately “construct” Proustian moments:

1. “The Crunchy Part of the Lasagne” (Massimo Bottura, Osteria Francescana)

• The idea: Massimo Bottura, the chef of the very restaurant discussed in your lecture, asked himself what memory almost all Italians share. The answer was simple: a Sunday family lunch cooked by a grandmother, and a desperate struggle with brothers and sisters for the tastiest piece of lasagne—the slightly burnt, crunchy corner of the baking dish.

• The dish: Bottura decided to serve only that corner. The dish is a deconstructed lasagne: a weightless, perfectly crisp strip of pasta, in the three colours of the Italian flag, floats above the lightest béchamel mousse and a rich meat ragù.

• The Proust effect: the guest bites into the crunchy piece, tastes the concentrated flavour of homemade ragù and is instantly transported thirty years back to the noisy kitchen of their Italian grandmother. Mature, dignified people in expensive suits have literally wept over this plate.

2. “Sound of the Sea” (Heston Blumenthal, The Fat Duck)

• The idea: British chef Heston Blumenthal, a pioneer of neurogastronomy, wanted to recreate the pure, childlike happiness of a summer trip to the seaside: running across the sand while gulls cry and the salty breeze fills the air.

• The dish: the waiter brings a wooden box with a glass top, containing real sand. On the glass is an arrangement that perfectly imitates the shore: edible “sand” made from tapioca and miso butter, various seafood, seaweed and “sea foam”. But the main secret is that the dish comes with a seashell concealing an iPod and headphones.

• The Proust effect: the guest puts on the headphones and hears the surf, the cries of gulls and the crunch of footsteps on sand, while inhaling the aroma of sea foam. Hearing, taste and smell come together. The brain receives a powerful signal, and the person instantly “drops out” of the restaurant, transported to a childhood holiday by the coast.

The connection with menu language: notice how this echoes Jurafsky’s lecture. These dishes do not need words such as “real” lasagne or “fresh” seafood.

Their names are simply buttons that trigger emotion; the guest’s memory does the rest.

The dome at Alchemist is precisely what finally erases the boundary between dinner and immersive theatre.

If Professor Jurafsky discussed in our lecture how restaurants use words on menus to create atmosphere, chef Rasmus Munk has gone radically further. He has discarded words altogether. Instead of writing long menu texts, he physically places you inside the idea behind each dish.

The main act of dinner at Alchemist takes place inside an enormous planetarium. You sit at a winding table, beneath a 360-degree projection. The imagery and soundtrack change completely for each “impression”.

Here is how it works in practice:

• Illusion and plastic in the ocean: when you are served a dish addressing ocean pollution—for example, an edible “piece of plastic” or cod—the dome around you becomes an underwater world. You relax while looking at beautiful jellyfish, then suddenly notice that they are transforming into floating plastic bags. The sound of water and these images make the dish’s flavour far more dramatic.

• Giant eyes and dystopia: for certain provocative dishes, often referring to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or shaped like a human brain or eye, enormous eyes appear on the dome. They blink slowly and literally follow your every movement. Eating while being watched from all sides is a powerful psychological experiment that creates a sense of vulnerability.

• Heartbeat and the circulatory system: when the “Drop of Blood”, Lifeline, arrives with its QR code for donors, the dome begins to pulse to the rhythm of a beating heart. Red blood cells float around you, and the sound of the pulse resonates directly in your chest.

• A burning forest: to emphasise deforestation, or when a dish with the aroma of ash and smoke is served, virtual flames may engulf the dome. You sit in the middle of a burning forest and hear the crackle of trees; this audiovisual sequence makes the receptors perceive the food’s smoky flavour ten times more intensely.

• The northern lights: for lighter dishes intended to “cleanse” your palate and provide a respite from difficult themes, the dome takes you beneath an Arctic night sky with shimmering aurora and soothing ambient music.

This is an ideal example of neurogastronomy. Munk knows that 80% of what we call “taste” arises in our brains through sight, hearing and smell. By controlling the dome, he literally hacks your perception of flavour. This is more than a restaurant: it is the quintessence of everything we have discussed. Here, food finally ceases to be merely food and becomes immersive theatre, art and even a political statement.

The fact that they call the servings “impressions”, rather than “dishes”, fits perfectly with the theory that avant-garde restaurants abandon traditional rules entirely and turn dinner into artistic performance. The guest is an audience member, surrendering control completely to the chef.

1. Social protest on a plate

• A chicken foot from a cage: this is an exceptionally powerful example of “social gastronomy”. The chef serves the dish directly on a metal cage. By making the guest hold a chicken foot and eat from it, Munk creates deliberate discomfort to draw attention to the conditions in which birds are kept on factory farms. It is not about feeling full; it is about making you think about where food comes from.

• The chocolate coffin: one of the most emotionally difficult impressions. This skilfully made chocolate is a direct statement against the exploitation of child labour on chocolate plantations in Africa. Munk makes us literally “swallow” this bitter truth with a sweet dessert.

2. A call to action (Lifeline)

• A drop of blood with a QR code: this is a brilliant symbiosis of cooking and charity. A blood-drop-shaped shell, often made with real pig’s blood for texture and colour, mixed with berries, conceals an icy filling. But the most important element is the QR code on the table. It is real. The chef uses the “Proustian moment” of surprise to direct you to a blood- or organ-donation website. Have you ever seen a menu save lives?

3. Playing with illusion and Pop Art

• Andy Warhol’s banana: Munk loves breaking the brain’s expectations. You see the classic banana from The Velvet Underground cover, but the peel is a crisp, edible shell concealing a wholly unexpected texture and flavour.

• Glowing amber: two spheres served on an illuminated cube. Inside this sugar or honey sweet, Munk often “entombs” wood ants, imitating a prehistoric insect trapped in amber. This invokes primal foraging and creates a powerful visual trigger. The ants’ acidity provides that burst of flavour.

4. The alchemy of textures

• Golden spheres: extremely thin, almost weightless golden crisps served on crumpled fabric. Alchemist often uses such textures to deceive the sense of touch: what looks like crumpled metal melts in the mouth in a fraction of a second.

• Airy cubes: sponge-like, porous forms. This is pure play with the physics of ingredients—dehydration and aeration, which we read about in the lecture.

• A siphon containing red liquid: a mesmerising process of distillation or brewing directly at the table. It transforms a drink from an ordinary accompaniment into an alchemical ritual.

Alchemist takes the concept of “dish names as art” to its absolute limit. Munk does not justify his prices with words such as “fresh” or “real”: he sells you a worldview.

Be specific Let us consider some techniques we can apply when writing about food, not only in memoirs but also in cookbooks or restaurant reviews. Good food writing is simply good writing. We read either to learn something new or to enjoy ourselves. Good writing should be interesting, thoughtful, engaging and entertaining.

Be specific: use concrete language and sensory details to describe how food tastes. Food writing awakens memories; it is full of human emotion and sensuality. Avoid vague words such as delicious, tasty and yumm. Do not use too many adjectives, and steer clear of adverbs. When editing your draft, remove general words and replace them with specific ones, such as chanterelles. This makes your scenes more vivid for the reader. For example: My first awareness that food was more than a substance with which to fill your stomach when hungry, like filling up at a petrol station, came after my fourth year of primary school. It happened during a family holiday in Europe, aboard the Queen Mary, in the tourist-class dining room. Somewhere there is a photograph: my mother in Jackie O sunglasses, my younger brother and I in our painfully cute cruise outfits, boarding the enormous Cunard ocean liner, all of us anticipating our first transatlantic voyage, our first trip to my father’s ancestral homeland, France.

It was all about the soup. It was cold. This was something of a revelation to a curious fourth-grader whose experience of soup had so far been limited to Campbell’s cream of tomato and chicken noodle. I had been to restaurants before, of course, but this was the first food I truly noticed. It was the first food I enjoyed and, more importantly, remembered as something pleasurable. I asked our patient British waiter what this wonderfully cool, tasty liquid was. “Vichyssoise,” came the reply. A word that, even now—despite its becoming a tired workhorse on every menu and a dish I have prepared thousands of times—still sounds magical to me. (Excerpt from Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, 2000)

Use action verbs

Use action verbs rather than passive constructions to give your writing movement. Some active verbs you can use to describe food preparation are drizzle, sprinkle, peel, scrape, crush, slather, grind and scorch. Notice how these words feel: they bring the text to life. Active verbs can be used to describe anything—a place, a scene or people. For example, here is an excerpt from Mei Chin’s James Beard Award-winning article “Eat Drink Mother Daughter”, published in Saveur in 2018. This paragraph forms part of the introduction, where she describes the setting as she and her mother visit a Taiwanese night market.

“Ultimately, it is Tainan’s strangeness that seduces me, especially the carefree way sex, death and old-fashioned hospitality mingle here. Scantily dressed beer promoters with the Heineken logo across their chests weave through brightly lit family restaurants. Vendors praise their coffin-shaped breads, while children chew cold meat left on altars in honour of the dead. Meanwhile, ladies wear hats and shelter beneath parasols, their faces as pale as the moon.”

2. Use metaphors Metaphors enrich writing. The symbolism of food in literature is no different from its symbolism in painting. French philosopher and essayist Roland Barthes said, “Metaphor is the salt of words.” Just as salt enhances the flavour of food, metaphor makes writing more vivid.

Roland Barthes gave several examples of powerful culinary symbols: he said that wine is to the French what milk is to the Dutch. Wine signifies transformation, from dry earth into moist liquid. It also changes people’s behaviour. Wine differs from spirits: it implies a positive form of intoxication. Milk, according to Barthes, is anti-wine because it soothes, restores and envelops. Milk is pure and innocent. Barthes also wrote about steak and chips. Steak, he said, was as much a part of sanguine mythology as wine. It is the heart of meat, its pure state. It symbolises bovine strength. Steak benefits every temperament. It is a national element in France. It combines succulence and simplicity. It is both basic and elegant. It is patriotic, like the flesh of a soldier. An example of metaphor in literature: Émile Zola’s novel The Belly of Paris, or Le Ventre de Paris, published in 1873 and set in the bustling market of Les Halles. In this passage, the smell of the many cheeses in Madame Lecœur’s storeroom is compared to a symphony. The section became known as the “Cheese Symphony”: “The cheeses stank from every side. On two shelves at the back of the shop lay enormous pieces of butter: Breton butter overflowing its baskets; Norman butter wrapped in canvas, resembling casts of bellies over which a sculptor had thrown wet cloths… […] Beside the pound packages of butter lay a gigantic Cantal, as though split by axe blows; then came golden Cheshire, Gruyère like a wheel that had fallen from some barbarian chariot, Dutch cheeses resembling severed heads smeared with dried blood and hard as skulls, which had earned them the name ‘dead heads’. Parmesan added its aromatic sharpness to the others’ thick, muffled smell. […] Then came the strongly scented cheeses… each adding its piercing note to a phrase so sharp it induced nausea.

…It was the smell of Camembert that they noticed most strongly. This cheese, with its gamey reek, drowned out the milder odours of Maroilles and Limburger; its power was astonishing. From time to time, however, a faint breath, a note like the sound of a flute, came from the Parmesan, while the Bries entered with their soft, musty odour—the quiet sound, so to speak, of a damp tambourine. Livarot launched into a staggering reprise, while Géromé sustained the symphony with a prolonged note.”

3. Use analogy or simile Similes differ slightly from metaphors. They compare two things without directly calling an object something else. We use words such as “like” or “as if” to make a comparison. They are an excellent alternative to adjectives, but try to avoid worn-out clichés, such as “soft as silk”.

Here is an example from New York Times critic Sam Sifton, who likens eating toast to a kiss: “The very first item on Marea’s menu is ricci, a piece of warm toast thickly spread with sea-urchin roe, covered with a thin slice of lardo, Italian cured pork fat, and scattered with sea salt. It produces exactly the sensation of kissing an incredibly attractive person for the first time—a flash of surprise and pleasure at once. Salt and fat give way to a primal sweetness and combine in a supremely pleasurable fashion. The feeling lingers on the tongue and vibrates through the entire body.”

4. Use dialogue

Dialogue helps characterise people without discussing their character directly. It also establishes relationships between characters.

Below is an excerpt from Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone, from its first chapter, “The Queen of Mould”. Through dialogue, we gain a sense of who her mother is: “‘I can make a meal out of anything,’ my mother proudly told her friends. She loved boasting about ‘Everything Stew’, a dish invented while she was preparing a casserole from a two-week-old turkey carcass. The very fact that my mother admitted to cooking with a two-week-old turkey says a great deal about her. She put the turkey and half a tin of mushroom soup into a saucepan, then began rummaging through the refrigerator. She found leftover broccoli and added it. A few carrots followed, then half a carton of sour cream. In a hurry, as usual, she added green beans and cranberry sauce. Then, somehow, half an apple pie slid into the dish. For a moment, my mother looked horrified. Then she shrugged and said, ‘Who knows? It might be good.’ And she began throwing in everything else from the refrigerator: leftover pâté, some cheese scraps and a few softened tomatoes.”

5. Use humour

Writing does not have to be serious. As you search for your own voice, you can practise using humour.

Here is a poem by John Updike, the American writer known for his attention to the concerns and passions of ordinary Americans: FOOD It is always there, The true best friend of man. It never bites back; It is already dead. It does not say we are poor lovers Or call us for an interview. It simply pleads, “Take me”; It cries, “I’m yours.” “Mash me all over,” it says; “Everything you are is pure.”

The process of creative writing and editing

This lecture provides guidance on the creative-writing process, from generating initial ideas to refining the final text. It explains how to use various prompts, including sensory ones, to begin a first draft, described as an unedited flow of memories.

The lecture then examines the crucial editing stage in detail, emphasising careful word choice, stylistic awareness and reader engagement. It provides a checklist of elements to review during editing and practical advice—taking breaks, reading aloud and seeking feedback—to improve the quality of the written work.

Main points (Knowledge Points)

1. The writing process: from prompt to first draft

• Beginning with prompts o Writing can be initiated with a “prompt”, which may be a single word, a sentence or an image.

o In food writing, the prompt may be sensory, such as a particular smell, sound or taste.

o Meeting notes or an interview transcript may also serve as starting material.

• The nature of a first draft o The initial version of a written work is called the “first draft”.

o This draft is usually raw and unedited, and is often described as a “mess”.

o The content of a first draft comes mainly from memory: it is a process in which writing “comes from the heart”.

o Technical details are filled in later during editing, allowing the initial creative flow to continue uninterrupted.

2. The process of editing and revision

• The art of editing o Editing takes place at a higher level of thought, with conscious attention to style and word choice, word by word.

o The process is compared to reading “one small piece at a time” to ensure that the words work together and convey the intended meaning and effect.

o Writing becomes a “work of art” when the right words are chosen and arranged correctly to create both meaning and emotion.

o Writing succeeds when readers can relate to it and feel, smell and see what the writer has described.

• An editing checklist o A set of questions can guide the editing of a draft:

Is the voice—the author’s tone—clear and consistent? § Is the metaphor coherent, and does it work effectively? § Are clichés avoided? § Are there enough specific descriptions? § Is the character developed? § Does the title work? §

• Practical editing advice o Take a break: step away from the work before beginning the editing process.

o Allow enough time: rushing through editing leads to missed errors and overlooked opportunities for improvement.

o Adopt the reader’s perspective: read the work as though encountering it for the first time, to gain objectivity.

o Read the work aloud: this helps check punctuation and catch repeated words.

o Seek outside feedback: if possible, ask someone else to read the work.

o If that person is your spouse, ask them to be gentle in their criticism.

Food-writing techniques

This lecture extract serves as a concluding reflection on food writing. It reiterates that the class defined the field and considered effective techniques with examples. Its central idea is that the principles of strong food writing—clarity, effectiveness and creativity—are universally applicable and immediately useful to the audience, whether their focus is professional, personal or creative, including memoirs, cookbooks and novels.

Key points (Knowledge Points)

1. The nature and benefits of food writing

• Defining food writing Earlier in the lecture, the essence of food writing was defined, and examples of accomplished work in the genre were considered.

• The wider relevance of food-writing techniques The skills gained from studying this subject are useful to everyone because they support clear and effective communication. Food writing provides a means of self-expression and a way to talk about one’s work and interests.

• The benefits of studying creative writing Learning creative-writing techniques improves a person’s abilities as both reader and writer. The skills practised in the lecture offer the audience immediate practical benefits. They apply to various forms, including professional food writing, memoirs, cookbooks and novels.