Tasting with Our Entire Selves: A Review of Jehanne Dubrow's Taste: A Book of Small Bites
While reading Jehanne Dubrow’s new collection of essays, Taste: A Book of Small Bites, published in August of 2022 by Columbia University Press, I came down with Covid and lost my senses.
The irony was that the loss was asymmetrical: The virus completely obscured my sense of smell, but my sense of taste remained—muted, but present. This surprised me. In Diane Ackerman’s renowned A Natural History of the Senses, a text quoted in Dubrow’s collection, Ackerman suggests that smell “contributes grandly” to our sense of taste. Yet throughout the month it took me to recover, smell on its own did nothing for me. Days-old garbage was a still life in a bucket; the inside of the fridge was simply cold. Only certain foodstuffs broke through the barrier, and only when allowed to linger on my tongue: milk chocolate, sea salt, tomatoes, vermouth, overripe bananas, anything pickled or brined. The extremes of salty, sweet, and sour. The rest—the bitter, the subtle, the nuanced—tasted as if I were peering at it through frosted glass.
This might sound like old news after nearly three pandemic-stained years. I too knew the statistics. I knew one of the five million Americans who permanently lost their sense of taste and smell from Covid. But that couldn’t prepare me for the shock of being cut loose from the neural connections that tell us what the immediate world is like, that help us gauge what is pleasant and safe or rancid and toxic. The texture of the world had flattened overnight. Everything was smooth, slippery, and I slid off the face of it. Taste and smell are useful, of course, but I had never realized just how emotional they are: It is meaningful simply to exist in a world that is dynamic and surprising. While I waited for my body to recover, Dubrow’s bite-sized essays, each celebrating and interrogating a different ingredient or material that activates our sense of taste, gave me access to a sensual joy and complexity of experience that my body wouldn’t allow.
In the introduction or “Aperitif,” Dubrow tells us that this book is written for those of us who appreciate “a repast filled with dozens of varied cacophonous flavors.” Those flavors, which Diane Ackerman calls “themes,” lend the collection an overarching structure. If the book were a tongue—like the symmetrical diagram you might remember from science class—each section of the collection would be a distinct taste region (sweet, sour salty, bitter, and umami), and each brief fragment would be a taste bud, compact and keen.
In a bud of “Sweet,” Dubrow cuts into an apple and ponders the world-expanding power of taste in the story of Adam and Eve. In “Sour,” she recalls the strawberry candy belts she “scalded” her tongue with while reading Shakespeare’s sonnets during a difficult breakup. Salty invokes sex and sweat, Warhol’s cans of soup, and olives brined in poetry, history, and culture. Like Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat, the project succeeds in making the familiar wonderful again by revealing the materiality of everyday life to be both marvelously simple (or at least categorizable) and endlessly nuanced.
In the quest for balance, each category is given its due, providing us a heuristic to identify the components of what we call “taste”: hunger, pleasure, nostalgia, culturally constructed preference, and more. As in life, these components are far from discrete. “The map of the tongue is more complicated than we might have previously imagined,” Dubrow writes. “To taste is to use our entire selves in the ingestion and digestion of food.”
Like other collaged nonfiction and fragmentary book-length essays—Jazmina Barrera’s Linea Nigra and Maggie Nelson’s Bluets come to mind—Dubrow’s scope is monumental within a confined space. The flash essay allows Dubrow’s critical eye to roam over a broad terrain—including literature, art criticism, chemistry, philosophy, etymology, and more, all braided with personal narrative—while uncovering something elemental about the olive, the sour belt, the sip of green tea. Dubrow proves an insightful yet accessible critic as she turns her eye on everything from Wayne Thiebaud’s pastel cakes to Chekhov’s gooseberries. The researched material, if a bit heavy handed with direct quotations, is rendered throughout with authority and the kind of barely contained enthusiasm that quickens one’s own heartbeat. The book is “a product of my own idiosyncratic way of tasting the world,” Dubrow tells us. “It reveals my training as a poet, my love of the visual arts, my anxieties about the relationship between trauma and the beautiful.”
Within each miniature essay or “small bite,” Dubrow flexes her poetic, reverential diction and mastery of rhythm and sound. Tea leaves don’t steep, they “give themselves over” to the liquid. Jasmine tea conjures the image of “white petals, indolic on the vines.” Dubrow also has the gift of the ending line, twirling phrases closed like the pinched tails of a wrapped caramel.
Both Dubrow’s exquisitely wrought language and breadth of subject matter remind us that the object is never just the object. Ingredients are their raw materials, auras, histories, and associated memories. Chocolate, for example, becomes “part science and part magic;” part history and part literature, a cacao product bastardized by the conquest of the Americas as well as a symbol of passion and transformation. It is memory—the chocolate syrup the narrator once watched her father squirt directly into his mouth—and ritual, the sipping chocolate she now melts into the bottom of a mug each day with a touch of agave nectar.
Despite the “magic” at work, the essays in Dubrow’s collection are necessarily haunted by the legacies of genocide, slavery, extractivism, war, and heartbreak that have given us access to the delicious and indulgent. Like Dubrow, I’m a Jewish woman, and I felt a kinship with her nuanced approach to, and troubled reverence for, the ingredients, foodstuffs, and even bodily secretions she holds up to the light. Judaism encourages a multiplicity—better yet, a “cacophony”—of interpretations of everything, not least our own story of liberation and its cost. When we dip parsley in salt water on Passover, we taste the tears we shed as slaves in Egypt and the tears that were shed by our captors after the tenth plague killed their firstborn sons. Dubrow looks at Thiebaud’s cloying cakes and finds “cruelty in these canvases,” sees the hands that “extract whiteness from the cane” to produce affordable sugar. The project’s indulgence is always aware of itself, making the book a welcome update to classics like M.F.K. Fisher’s Alphabet for Gourmets, which might alienate some readers with its occasionally blithe elitism. We are continuously reminded that the freedom of one often means the suffering of another.
Taste activates memory, both embodied and historical. As a result, taste is a study in contradictions, in the opposing forces—sour and sweet, revulsion and deliciousness, grief and hope—that commingle in our mouths. Dubrow captures the ambivalent interconnectedness within the body and the body politic that allows a virus to rob us of our senses and alienate us from each other, even as our individual choices affect others more than ever.
When my taste returns, I am standing on a balcony with an ice cream cone in my left hand and a glass of red wine in my right. I have been technically Covid-free for three weeks. The ice cream is flecked with Oreo crumbs, like grains of sand. The change is sudden, like the gust of warm wind that lifts the hem of my dress to my hips—intimate, revealing—and when the smoky, almost charred bite of the cocoa breaks through, followed by the fermented banana peel tang of vanilla and cream, I laugh with relief. It is the feeling Taste gave me: that of reencountering the familiar with a deeper, more nuanced understanding after a long absence. It comes at you slant — unexpected, strange, and then immediately dear.
Jehanne Dubrow (@JehanneIDubrow) is the author of nine poetry collections, including most recently Wild Kingdom (Louisiana State University Press, 2021), and two books of creative nonfiction, throughsmoke: an essay in notes (New Rivers Press, 2019) and Taste: A Book of Small Bites (Columbia University Press, 2022). Her third book of nonfiction, Exhibitions: Essays On Art & Atrocity, will be published by University of New Mexico Press in 2023. Her writing has appeared in Poetry, New England Review, Colorado Review, and The Southern Review. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas.
Lena Crown (@which_is_to_say) is a writer from Northern California. Her work is published or forthcoming in Guernica, Gulf Coast, Narratively, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sonora Review, and The Offing, among others. She serves as a PEN/Faulkner Writer in Residence, writes for the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and edits books for Autofocus.