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The Spark

Everything we remember about flavour, the freshness of a basil leaf, the pleasure of warm bread, the complexity of coffee, is born from invisible molecules that move through the air. They are volatile, escaping with heat or when the fibre of a plant breaks, reaching us through the nose and mouth.
These volatile compounds do not create taste in themselves, since they are not sweet, salty, or bitter, but they give food its sensory character. Without them, coffee would lose its depth, strawberries their perfume, and wine would be only a warm, storyless liquid.
As Harold McGee writes in Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells, aromas are the bits of matter we breathe, mediating between the physical and the sensory, shaping an invisible atmosphere that gives meaning to the world we eat.
They are the aerial architecture of flavour, the unseen framework that links matter to memory.

If our purpose at The Black Artichoke is to redesign the food system, we must first understand what drives us to choose, desire, or remember certain foods.
What connects a dish to a culture, allowing it to cross borders as part of the invisible luggage of an identity that defies distance.
For millennia, food, and especially the aromas and flavours it carries, has been more than a companion on our journeys. It has been a way home.
A volatile ticket, able to transport memory, affection, and belonging.
A promise of return that guides us, through the senses, back to ourselves.
Every aroma holds a coordinate, every flavour a map of emotion.
Eating is, often, a way of returning home.
That is why understanding the architecture of taste and the nature of aromatic compounds is where we begin.

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The first meeting between the outer world and our inner world of aromas begins in the nose.
At the top of the nasal cavity sits the olfactory epithelium, the gateway of smell, a tiny territory where the molecules of the world touch our neurons and, in that instant, become experience.
In gastronomy, we use the term aromatic compounds to describe the volatile molecules we perceive as odour, the ones that travel to the olfactory epithelium and define the aromatic profile of what we eat.

To orient ourselves, it helps to distinguish three essential sensory dimensions.

• Taste is sensed in the mouth, mainly through receptors on the tongue. Each person detects only a few basic tastes, sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami.
• Aroma is perceived through the nose, either orthonasally, when we smell something directly, or retronasally, when we chew and the volatile molecules rise through internal passages to the olfactory epithelium. Aroma gives food its complexity and individuality.
• Flavour is the total experience, the neural fusion of taste, aroma, texture, temperature, and the trigeminal sensations of heat, coolness, or astringency.

When we say something tastes like strawberry or like toasted bread, we are describing our own sensory interpretation, the result of many signals combined and processed by the brain.
There is no “universal flavour”, because each person’s gustatory and olfactory abilities are different, shaped by the sensitivity and density of their receptors and by how their brain translates what it receives.

Ole G. Mouritsen reminds us that this distinction is crucial. Taste happens on the tongue, but flavour, as a lived experience, is created in the brain, where aroma plays the leading role.
In his books Umami: Unlocking the Secrets of the Fifth Taste and Mouthfeel: How Texture Makes Taste, Mouritsen develops this idea further: flavour, he explains, is not a property of the food itself, but an act of perception, the brain’s creation as it merges taste, aroma, and texture into one experience.

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This first glimpse helps us understand how we perceive flavour, and why, at a table of ten diners, there can be ten different emotions in front of the same dish.
Each of us is unique, and so are our sensory experiences. That is why a single food can feel sublime to one person and unpleasant to another: flavour is not in the thing itself, but in how we perceive it.

Long before we understood its mechanisms, humanity had already learned to shape aroma.
Distillation, fermentation, and roasting were, unknowingly, early forms of sensory alchemy, ways of turning matter into emotion.
Only in the nineteenth century did science begin to identify the molecules responsible for aroma, formalising what humans had been exploring for millennia without knowing why.
Smell, once guided purely by intuition, became a chemical language, a tool for understanding matter from within.

The Development

1. Where aromas are born

The effort to understand aroma as a chemical phenomenon began in the nineteenth century, when science first succeeded in isolating specific molecules responsible for familiar scents.
In 1858, the French pharmacist and chemist Nicolas-Théodore Gobley, while studying the active principles of plants and foods, isolated from the vanilla pod a pure substance that, once crystallised, retained its own perfume. He named it vanillin.
It was not an accident, but the result of deliberate research into the chemical composition of natural products.
That discovery proved that aroma could be separated from the matter that held it and studied on its own, opening a new field of scientific inquiry.
From that moment, aroma stopped being merely an art of instinct and became a subject of study. The empiricism of perfumers slowly evolved into scientific method.

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Gobley’s work marked a turning point. For the first time, aroma could be isolated, analysed, and reproduced outside its original material.
This transformed the history of sensory perception in three spheres, perfumery, the food industry, and sensory science.

In Grasse, perfumers began working with chemists to isolate aldehydes, terpenes, and phenols found in essential oils of lavender, mint, or citrus.
The next leap came in Germany, where the company Haarmann & Reimer succeeded in synthesising vanillin from gallic acid, recreating the scent of vanilla without the tropical plant itself.
That advance began a new era, the age of synthetic aromas, which reshaped both perfumery and food production.
Industrial vanillin made production cheaper and more abundant.
What had once been an exotic ingredient became an accessible molecule, used equally in perfumes and foods.

From this emerged the concept of the reproducible flavour, a principle that anticipated the modern standardisation of taste.
It is the same principle that, today, leads many to prefer the taste of a vanilla ice cream made with vanillin over one made with natural vanilla, not because of quality, but through familiarity with the artificial and distance from the real complexity of the original.
That, however, is another story we will return to another time.

Alongside these discoveries, the ability to isolate aromatic compounds gave rise to the discipline of aroma chemistry, a branch of organic chemistry devoted to identifying, classifying, and understanding the molecules that create smell.
Over time, scientists began to recognise patterns and shared behaviours among these molecules, building what we might call a molecular grammar of aroma.
From this research came the great families of aromatic compounds, each with its own sensory identity.

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Terpenes bring freshness and herbal notes.
Phenols are warm and spicy.
Aldehydes are green and bright.
Esters are sweet and fruity.
Sulphur compounds are deep and savoury.
Pyrazines are roasted and earthy.
Lactones and ketones are soft, creamy, and comforting.

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Together they form the chemical language of aroma, a bridge between the structure of matter and the emotion of taste.

For those wishing to explore this world, an essential starting point is the book Taste Buds and Molecules: The Art and Science of Food, Wine, and Flavor by the Canadian sommelier François Chartier.
In it, Chartier describes these aromatic families with clarity and scientific rigour, while inviting readers to travel through them using aromatic pairings, combinations that reveal how molecules converse and amplify each other.
More than a manual, it is a map, a guide for learning to smell, taste, and think through the palate, a practice that deepens the craft of anyone who loves the kitchen.

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This same journey, between aroma and knowledge, between science and history, lies at the heart of The Black Artichoke.
From here, we will explore taste as a cultural territory, a space where molecules think, recipes converse with science, and emotion becomes method.

Each article will be part of that map, an attempt to understand how we eat, why we desire what we desire, and what stories lie behind the aromas that have followed us since childhood.
We will speak of fermentation and memory, of artificial intelligence and instinct, of biotechnology and the human act of cooking, always in search of questions that may never find a single answer.

Redesigning the food industry is not only a technical task, it is a cultural gesture, a way of imagining the future.
The Black Artichoke is an invitation to see taste as a collective intelligence, to rethink what we eat, what we make, and who we are.

And that journey, as invisible as aroma itself, begins here.

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Harold McGee. Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells. Penguin Press, 2020.
Ole G. Mouritsen & Klara T. Johansen. Umami: Unlocking the Secrets of the Fifth Taste. Columbia University Press, 2014.
Ole G. Mouritsen & Klavs Styrbæk. Mouthfeel: How Texture Makes Taste. Columbia University Press, 2017.
François Chartier. Taste Buds and Molecules: The Art and Science of Food, Wine, and Flavor. McClelland & Stewart, 2012.

","author":"Bibliography"}]

Gastronomy

The Architecture of Taste

The Architecture of Taste