Habitual Tastes and Embedded Taste

The interest of this paper is to position taste within the framework of time. This might seem peculiar given that taste, in its physical sense, is referred to as an ephemeral experience taking place in the mouth. Taste, however, is more than that. It is the transient experience that infiltrates the body in the act of eating and, at the same time, it has associative powers that allow taste to transcend the instantaneous sensory encounter. Taste is a synthesis of multiple sensory impressions involving all five senses, each sense contributing with a particular facet of sensory experience. But this does not mean that taste is entirely individual. It goes beyond the sphere of the individual in the sense that taste can be handed over and thus lay out a basis for shared remembrance.

The focal point will be the interplay between the individual taste-experiences of various registers of tastes and collective references to historically constructed practices acknowledged as regional or national cuisines. Where the individual taste-experiences refer to separated moments in time in which a range of tastes is encountered and – perhaps – recognised, the long-term stability in practices inherent in the idea of the national cuisine indicates continuity over time. There seems, hence, to be a gap between the multiplicity of instances of experience and recollection that belongs to the sphere of the individual and a historical memory embedded in the larger context of a society. From a common-sense perspective, this gap may be bridged by story-telling or other ways of handing over historically embedded practices, but this leaves a more fundamental question unanswered. Namely, that given that all remembrance has individual recollection as the point of departure, then how does individual recollection of tastes translate into stable collective references to a codified cuisine acknowledged as regional or national heritage?