Savory Science

This publication is a resuscitation of a project I started in the early 2000’s. The concept was, and still is, to produce educational content that encourages every curious type to view their kitchen as a laboratory to engage with, and challenge the ideas that are presented to us as scientific facts by researchers and experts across the full range the natural sciences.

I may have earlier memories of appreciating the curious utility of the kitchen, but there is an early one that marks a pivotal moment in my life, one that shaped the way I see and navigate the world to this moment. I learned to read early, that is I learned to apply the rules of American phonetics to the English alphabet in preschool. It was more of a parlor trick than it was a useful ability. I was and still am slow to comprehend the sounds when all strung together into words and sentences, but then and still now I find a certain joy in that slow process of deciphering texts that were deliberately constructed to convey the wonders of the world as experienced through another’s set of senses. Daily I would search for random interesting bits in our collection of Compton’s Encyclopedia.

In first grade, I started receiving World magazine, a kids magazine from National Geographic. I’ve searched and can’t find any evidence of it, but in my memory, one of those issues had a recipe for chocolate mousse. Wherever it appeared, that recipe was the thing that instigated the transformative experience that ensued. It represented a convergence of all things that gave me joy - curiosity and discovery, agency though understanding, family and chocolate.

When visiting my mother’s parent’s - ‘grandmother and grandaddy’ - one of the first outings my grandmother and I would make, after the our 8 hour long drive, would be to the grocery store. As far as I remember the sole purpose of going to the grocery store was to get me some Jello brand chocolate pudding. I would then impatiently watch her heat some milk in an aluminum sauce pan, stir in the impossibly small amount of the contents of 2 boxes of the pudding powder, portion it into white ceramic bowls and then have to wait for it to cool overnight in the fridge so it could congeal and most critically form the ‘skin’ on the top.

Every sensorial and sensual aspect of every moment of that experience is readily accessible to me now more than fifty years later. Every aspect — from walking through my grandparents front door, in from the peculiar (but not unpleasant to me) outside smell of 1970’s Birmingham, Alabama, into the smells of peppermint, courtesy of the green candy bowl next to the door, and coffee, specifically Maxwell House coffee made by percolation. The wood paneled walls and the green sculpted carpet and the Yamaha studio piano are still nearly tangible to me; The Piano is literally tangible to as it lives in my house now.