Taste
A Book of Small Bites
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- £16.99
Publisher Description
Taste is a lyric meditation on one of our five senses, which we often take for granted. Structured as a series of “small bites,” the book considers the ways that we ingest the world, how we come to know ourselves and others through the daily act of tasting.
Through flavorful explorations of the sweet, the sour, the salty, the bitter, and umami, Jehanne Dubrow reflects on the nature of taste. In a series of short, interdisciplinary essays, she blends personal experience with analysis of poetry, fiction, music, and the visual arts, as well as religious and philosophical texts. Dubrow considers the science of taste and how taste transforms from a physical sensation into a metaphor for discernment.
Taste is organized not so much as a linear dinner served in courses but as a meal consisting of meze, small plates of intensely flavored discourse.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Dubrow (Wild Kingdom) considers the five basic tastes—sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami—in this amusing collection of essays. Drawing on literature, art, and history, Dubrow highlights the hidden cost of sweetness, noting both the gingerbread cottage "dripping with icing" that entraps the characters in Hansel and Gretel, and the slave labor that made refined sugar affordable in the 18th century. She then turns to sour, recalling a summer in her early 20s when she was obsessed with eating sour candy ("In that long summer of my loneliness and fury, everything seemed sour to me") and examining Chekhov's "Gooseberries," in which the berries are sweet or sour depending on who eats them. Salty reminds Dubrow of tears and of A.E. Stallings's poem "Olives"; bitter comes in tea, cooked greens, and the coffee in Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks; and umami is the stuff of cheese, tomatoes, mushrooms, and broth: "Thin soup. Clear to the bottom of the bowl." Dubrow's musings are at once sober and evocative, and she succeeds admirably in getting "around the ungainliness of words by finding metaphors for taste." These thoughtful meditations offer lots to savor.
