Harold McGee’s Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells is an ambitious and enormous work. Indeed it’s so large, at 654 pages and weighing nearly a kilo, that I could only manage to read it at the kitchen table — which made me appreciate its wipe-clean binding. Its distinctive new-book smell (there is such a thing) contrasts mightily with the musty, familiar old-book scent of my study. As I walk through the house, I detect the not entirely agreeable whiff of last night’s wood fire in the sitting-room, but this gives way to the snap-to-attention aroma of just-made coffee, the fragrance of the sliced banana and apple in the morning muesli, the scent of the loaf just out of the oven and the unmistakable redolence of toast. Of course, there’s the flip side; it’s amazing how much of this book is about bad smells — ‘faecal’ and ‘urinous’ frequently qualify one of Roget’s very many synonyms for ‘smell’.
Though it’s easy to be sceptical or cynical about the wine-taster’s weird vocabulary — tarry, mossy, spicy, buttery, grassy smells and the aromas of pine, raspberries, vanilla and even cat’s pee — it’s more than coincidence that analysts can find the molecules for these in the wine in your glass. McGee, whose academic work has evolved from Keats to ketones, enthusiastically explains the science of everyday smells in this near-encyclopaedic tome. Having written the pioneering yet definitive work On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, McGee was spurred to research the sense of smell by the experience of eating his first grouse. Our love of game (if you do love it) is partly composed of a taste for decomposing ‘high’ flesh; and the scent of a properly cooked grouse is not that of the heather on which the bird fed but partly the metallic odour of iron-rich liver.
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