Thread by @krishashok

It still blows my mind that the largest superfamily of genes in the human genome is dedicated to...the sense of smell. One would have assumed that it might be something more critical but it does indeed suggest that we have significantly underestimated olfaction for a long time.

Also, this seeming truism about dogs having a better sense of smell than human beings is, it turns out, only partially true. Dogs are fantastically adapted to orthonasal olfaction (smelling things from the outside) while human beings are absolute gods at retronasal olfaction

Dogs have fantastic external smelling apparatus but very limited brain capacity to process those smells. But human beings experience smell as a pandimensional experience in our brains, and that's what makes cooking such a uniquely human endeavour

The other mindbending trick our brain plays with the sense of smell in the context of flavour is that it has to fool you into thinking that it's the mouth where the action is happening while in reality, it's mostly the nose and brain that do all the hard work

We can listen to music and reproduce it with our vocal cords. We can close our eyes and visualize images from the past. But we can't resynthesize flavour molecules in our mouths to "remember" flavours

So, literally the only time when we "remember" smells is when we eat something familiar, and it evokes a strong nostalgic recall of having smelled it before, and that experience is what makes food "delicious" or "comfort food". It's a deeply personal experience

Which is why anyone telling you that ingredient X does not belong in Y is essentially telling you - "your personal nostalgia of having eaten X with Y that makes that experience delicious for you IS INVALID AND ONLY MY SMELL MEMORIES ARE SUPERIOR"

So, someone who does not have flavour nostalgia of "plain" dosa is able to enjoy a Szechwan dosa more easily than someone who grew up eating dosas every day. And just to irk purists, the chap enjoying Szechwan dosa regularly might one day prefer that to the "authentic" thing

So, I think the fact that there are lots of people who absolutely love paneer makhani pizzas and there are a lot of annoyed Italians gesture-outraging at this is what makes cooking such a truly free-spirited, hyper-evolutionary endeavour. Purists will always lose