Scent

I just tried truffles for the first time. Tetsuya's black truffle salsa mixed into butter and slathered onto a lightly toasted slice of wholemeal sourdough from Laurent. Now I get it. The whole fuss about truffles. They smell like sex. Musky, pungent, earthy. It's like nothing else I've ever smelt. Sticking my nose into the tiny jar sent my olfactory nerves ablaze and the first thing it evoked was sex. Raw animalistic sex. The heady scent is just indescribable and that's the closest approximation I can come up with. My little epiphany at 11pm in a dinky kitchen. Ok, sure I've had dishes which purportedly contain truffle oil but those don't come anywhere close to this. Any traces of truffles in the pasta you get at Alexis are drowned by everything else they chuck in - mushrooms, cream, more cream. It's damn near undetectable. There are too many other flavours and textures to draw your attention there. But this. There's no mistaking this. Forget oysters, if you want an aphrodisiac truffles are the way to go. Oysters are mere imagery and texture - who associates sex with brine? Oysters are delicious in their own right but as aphrodisiacs they get their hard shelled innards whooped by truffles. Asparagus? hah, I laugh at you. Scent is where it's at. And the scent of truffles is lingering in my nose and my mouth. The way the sillage of a perfume lingers in a room after the wearer has left, the aroma of truffles lingers in my senses.

On a similar note, I took a whiff of Etat Libre d'Orange's Magnificent Secretions perfume in Mecca today. That too smelt like sex, but in a completely different way. I guess the name says it all. It smelt like the atmosphere in a room post-coitus, animalistic notes, semen, blood. It made me frown but I still took a second sniff. Interesting and unique yes. Wearable? NO! Truffles smell like raw animalistic sex. Magnificent Secretions smelt like the dirtier, sadomasochistic, even more violent older brother of aforementioned sex with the element of pleasure removed. Almost foul. Nurgh..

I'm going to play with my truffle salsa more tomorrow - with gently warmed olive oil in fresh pasta? mmm...
This will be my substitute for sex. Because I'M BEING GOOD. dammit. I'm overworked and undersexed.