"How To Dunk A Doughnut"

[fiefoe]

The science of senses:

• The Italian Filippo Tommaso Marinetti {"Debt to Pleasure"} reported in his Futurist Cookbook of 1932 the experiment of eating the same food while resting his fingers lightly on either velvet or sand-paper. The perceived texture of the food, he reported, was quite different in the two cases.
• (Sir William) Gladstone, a careful and patient man, recommended chewing each mouthful of food 30 times. As it turns out, the bolus is normally shear-thickening over this range, reaching its maximum cohesion after thirty or so chews.
• Another quarter of the population (mostly women) seem to be bitterness supertasters, able to detect bitter compounds at abnormally low levels. In these people the papillae are tightly clustered and surrounded by a unique ring structure, whose function is not yet known.
• A case in point is the famous truffle, described by Rossini as the Mozart of fungi, where some 40 percent of the population are "tone-deaf" to the central aroma that gourmets rave about.
• Even with aroma cues, people cannot always distinguish between apparently dissimilar foods. Gruyere cheese and honey, for example, are very difficult to distinguish by aroma alone.
• The drinks that worked (to bring out cookie aroma) really well were cold milk. {Note taken.}
• Some "pure" odors, such as pinene (pine odor) and cadinene (juniper, an important component of gin), can even produce a sense of pain.
  

"Boomerangs? You mean the thinking person's Frisbee?"

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