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DIGESTED DIGEST TO THE BITTER END In his weekly n
ewsletter chef Cúán Greene expounds upon topics relevant to food culture, sharing insights, positing questions and meeting people who are adding to the collective pot. Each month, we share a selection of edited highlights from previous posts. Introducing… The Taste Game Growing up as a child, my father was particularly good at making up games to keep us amused, especially during the long summer holidays in Connemara. On fair days, we played ‘side to side’, a highly complex game where my siblings and I would run from one side of the garden to the next without him catching us. Another was ‘pinecone grenades’, which fell from the mammoth Douglas fir trees that led up to the house, littering the floor with ammunition to hurl at one another. That game usually ended up with a casualty or two. When it rained (which was frequent), we were restricted to the indoors and my father was forced to think innovatively. Without the distraction of a television, or the mental capacity for Irish radio, there was the birth of one game we loved above all others. Let me introduce you to the taste game. While my father would prepare his mise en place, us children would be told to leave the room for what seemed like an eternity. We were blindfolded and called in one by one, where we stood next to the dining table. Holding our hand, our finger was dabbed in one of the eight or so artfully decorated china bowls he had aligned, passed down by my great grandmother, each containing a condiment of his own choosing. Blindly, we would prod our finger around the contents of the bowl. The contrast of cold liquids of varying levels of viscosity was enough to send shivers down our spines. Then, mustering up the courage, we would prudently take our sauce-laden finger and place it in our awaiting mouths. What followed was either sheer pleasure and relief or unadulterated disgust. Amidst yelps and squeals, you can only imagine the anticipation from the children awaiting their turn behind the door. There were always a couple of tasty numbers 40 to be found within the taste game: honey, my mother’s blackberry jam or our favourite golden syrup. My father usually started with these for a hint of sweetness to whet the palate. Next up was salt or umami (a flavour not even my parents were aware of back in the ’90’s). Soy, ketchup, Aromat (a seasoning almost as mysterious as chicken salt) and Marmite, the latter never too well received. There were acidic flavours like lemon, vinegar and even salad cream which we almost always identified as sour. Then came the spicy condiments, such as Coleman’s mustard or Tabasco - I don’t think any other hot sauce existed in rural Ireland in those days. Lastly, and the flavour that was least palatable to us as children, was bitterness. Grapefruit juice, cocoa powder and turmeric, all too astringent, too complex, too pungent, a disagreeable sensation for our unprepared and underdeveloped palates. When I think back about the hilarity evoked by the taste game - especially when seeing your brother lob an unfoundedly amount of Hellman’s mayonnaise or mustard into his mouth, hoping it might be Nutella - I don’t believe for a moment that the activity had any educational intention. However, over the past couple of weeks, having dug a little deeper into the exact weight bitterness has in how we eat, I think the taste game could have more to it than a befitting solution to the Irish rain. Sweet is for sissies A number of months ago, I attended the La Dive Bouteille wine fair in the Loire Valley, Northern France. Hundreds of winemakers convened under one roof (of a cave for that matter) displaying their wild and wonderful vintages. Many wines were extraordinary and all were low intervention, but one producer I met stands out in my memory. Ivan Massonnat from Domaine Belargus located in Anjou, a winemaking region that over the years has fallen from grace. Ivan makes wine from 100% Chenin Blanc, which varies from dry to off-dry and all the way to wines with high sugar content, which are considered sweet. While I am no expert in wine, I have a keen interest and love for wine but I often find sweet wines to be overly so, particularly when sampled without food. Ivan’s wines were different. Despite carrying high levels of sugar, the wines were inherently less sweet than others I had tasted, even though they contained the same sugar content. But why? Ivan identified the reason to be the natural bitterness found in the grapes. The bitterness created the illusion that the wine was less sweet than it was (turning one pour quickly into two). This he identified as balance. At the time of tasting, I was coupled with my good friend Shane Murphy, a self-proclaimed professional wine drinker, who to his credit has worked in the industry for over two decades. I hold Shane’s opinion in high regard and I could see that he was bemused by this statement and slightly mystified but nodding in agreement. It was only later that he told me he had never heard of anyone accentuating the flavour of bitterness in the wine industry, as it’s usually seen as a fault. As it turns out, Domaine Belargus is not only redefining the vocabulary used within wine, but completely reinvigorating the world’s view on the wine making region of Anjou, one vintage at a time. This interaction with Ivan was a formative moment for me and the reason I took a deep dive into bitterness. It instantly got me thinking about bitterness in a way that I had never done before. When I returned from that trip I did a series of very quick tests. Just like my father had done for me in the past, I lined up three bowls: one containing chicory syrup, one with honey, and finally one with golden