By Franz Huber, Helensvale Writers Group

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“When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered … the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”

Marcel Proust – Remembrance of Things Past

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Here is a challenge: find some favourite passages by any of your favourite fiction authors. Take your pick of genre – romance, thriller, crime, fantasy or historical fiction.

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You will find plenty of references to sound or hearing (the most dominant, as in ‘“blah blah,” he said’, or the crack caused by metal hitting bone), sight (probably about equal to sound, as in ‘as she walked into the restaurant, most of the men involuntarily looked up for a fleeting moment …’), touch – and that includes you being touched (if it’s in romance, do I need to elaborate further? Really!), smell (as in ‘I recognised the earthy scent of his aftershave – Dior Sauvage’). And taste.

 

Taste? Sorry, ‘The juicy steak tasted delicious’ doesn’t cut the mustard. Mustard?

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Yes, that sharp, sometimes nose-tingling heat, underlying plant sweetness, and acidity from vinegar or wine, the grainy textures from seeds in stone-ground varieties … Taste is sadly absent in so many otherwise elegant works of prose. Dare I challenge you: this probably includes your own writing. Go on! Look at the last half dozen competition entries you’ve submitted.

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Here is an extract from one of mine, which at the time, I thought was quite elegant:

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             She let me wait till we both had finished the shared seafood platter, most of which had ended up on my plate. She hadn’t  even drunk half of her glass of  Pinot Gris. An obese man in a poorly fitting suit  passed our table on her side (1); the displaced air blew (2) a barely discernible  whiff of Hermès 24, her delicate perfume (3), to my erotic subconscious. Her shaggily cut, shoulder-length hair, dark chocolate with a trace of auburn,  reflected the golden glow of the antique  chandelier (1 again).

             ‘So, tell me more’ (4), she said. 

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Yup: (1) = sight, (2) = touch, (3) = smell, (4) = sound. Missing: taste.

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Did I describe the tastes of any item? Instead of having a seafood platter, I could have given myself a filet mignon and described the slightly burned, savoury taste of my medium-rare filet, enhanced by the salty flavour of sizzling, smoky bacon in which it was wrapped, a dollop of herbal butter at the top slowly beginning to melt, mixing with the clear jus beneath. Are you salivating already? I haven’t finished!

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The meal could have started with an entrée of prawns mixed with nectarines, the matching sweetness of the prawns offset by the sharpness of a lime juice dressing and enhanced by the mellow richness of hazelnut oil.

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Taste is the one sense that is almost always combined with other senses. After all, what you are trying to achieve in your writing is to stir your reader’s emotions. Thus, the tastes need to be paired with the other senses: colour, temperature, sound and, of course, the most important one – smell. As Russell Jones writes in Sense (Welbeck Publishing, 2020), it needs to be a combination where all our senses cross over. Did you know that (reportedly) coffee tastes better if you drink it from a red cup rather than a blue one? In it, he writes about enjoying a nice rosé whilst on holiday in the south of France. So he bought a couple of bottles to take home to England … You guessed it, it tasted nowhere near the same. Most of us wine lovers would recall a similar experience.

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The effects of certain tastes are dependent on the environment, particularly so in fiction writing. In a crime story, experienced readers would automatically associate the taste and smell of almonds emitting from the mouth of the victim with – not almonds, but arsenic! No, I’ve never tasted or smelled arsenic myself either, but Agatha Christie was certainly able to describe it vividly.

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How old the reader is makes a big difference as well. In her work Life in Five Senses (Two Roads, 2023), Gretchen Rubin describes a ‘tastes timeline’, beginning with young children’s tastes and continuing their evolution through to adulthood and old age. Baby food, anyone? Want to try to convince a toddler to eat fennel? Do you remember when, for the first time, you tried a sip of dad’s red wine? Yuk!

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Which tastes from childhood do you remember? Milk rice is mine, and I still love vanilla custard even today. Except that, when I was 10 years old, I’d eat the cake first, then the custard, whereas today I mix the two.

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So if, in your reader’s mind, your writing evokes a memory – particularly a childhood memory – you get them emotionally involved, and you have just gained another fan. On the other hand, if your writing is considered plain and boring, it might be described as ‘plain vanilla’. Yes, no emotional thumbs-up that vanilla custard might generate.

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Logically, the sense of taste is most commonly related to food, but it can equally invoke (if that is the right word) the visualisation of an experience unrelated to food – or a painful experience. Your hero got knifed? ‘The metallic taste of blood’ is perhaps a bit overused. How does bile mixed with saltwater (other than salty) taste when one is thrown out of a boat with concrete shoes? How does one describe the taste of making love? [No Henrietta, it’s been too long since I read Lady Chatterley’s Lover and I can’t remember whether it contained anything about taste in sex. It was banned at the time I was a teenager, which is the very reason why I read it. And it wasn’t a painful experience either. But, as it was 65 years ago, my memory has become dimmer …]

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Back to my competition story referred to above: its theme was about corruption in politics (only fiction, of course – this couldn’t possibly happen in real life now, could it?), and that would give most readers a sour taste. Unless, of course, you have a taste for politics. But don’t joke about it – that might be considered tasteless.

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