The Cook who couldnt taste

For most people,a whiff of fresh herbs can be restorative and calming. For Birnbaum,the author of a new memoir called Season to Taste,the simple act of bringing a sprig of rosemary to her nose carries the weight of a devotional ritual. Rosemary,after all,was the first scent that returned to her a few months after she was hit by a car in August 2005 while on a jog. As she recovered from a broken pelvis,a fractured skull and other injuries,she realised that relishing the taste and fragrance of food had evaporated from her life. Head trauma from the accident had led to nerve damage,and she couldnt smell a thing. Theres this part of your world that was so noisy and now its silent, she recalled. Many weeks later,while helping prepare dinner,I was chopping rosemary and it just came at me,very forcefully,I could smell something.

Birnbaum,28,lives in Boston,where she works as a cookbook editor. A recent trip to New York,where she lived for much of her recovery period,gave her a chance to bask in a city whose scents are both floral and foul. This was one of the places that marked my recovery, she said of the Greenmarket. Walking through the stalls was like adding colour back into a black-and-white movie. Before her accident,she worked in the kitchen with Tony Maws,a chef in Cambridge,Mass. When he first got a letter from Birnbaum,a Brown University graduate,asking about a job at the restaurant,Maws was tempted to toss it into the romantic pile of résumés from pie-eyed post-collegiates whove never roasted a lamb. But something about her query struck him. Her emotion came through. Totally randomly I needed a dishwasher,and I called her. I said: Youre going to get dirty. Your backs going to hurt. Birnbaum put up with the pain,Maws recalled,she was curious,inquisitive.

I now spend a lot more time breathing as I eat now, she said. When you exhale,thats when you really get the flavour in the back of your throat. People with a seriously diminished olfactory system dont really enjoy food that much said Beverly Cowart,director of the chemosensory clinical research programme at the Monell Chemical Senses Center,an institute that researches the senses of taste and smell. The accident derailed Birnbaums skills in the kitchen and her dream of formally studying the art of cooking. She now plans to make a career of writing about food and the way its woven into history and culture. It remains a mystery how she was able to recover her sense of smell. It might have to do with her youth,and with her determination to shove herbs up her nose until something started to register. I bullied it into recovery, she said with a laugh. After she had wandered around Union Square,she walked to Junoon,an Indian restaurant. There is a small chamber beneath the dining room where the chef,conjures up mesmerising blends of rare spices. The effect of stepping into this alternative atmosphere dense with turmeric and peppercorns,might be compared to a blind person seeing a blazing sunrise for the first time.

Smells like this,they bring you right back to childhood, she said. Its almost unfortunate that you have to lose something to understand what is there.