The history of cuisine and the five senses, what a changing and fascinating relationship. Summarising the subject - which deserves much more in-depth study - we could agree that, for almost all of the 20th century, the culinary aesthetic experience focused mainly on two senses, taste and sight.

In the priorities of every chef, palatability is naturally the conditio sine qua non. But in the cuisine of the last century, the appreciation of a dish is first a matter of sight and then of taste. Georges Auguste Escoffier, the theoretician of the classical school, knew this well: for him, beauty was a necessary premise of goodness. Indeed, the preparations in his recipe books contained ingredients that fitted together well first of all chromatically - think of the famous Peach Melba, a succession of colours from the pale yellow of a vanilla ice cream to the bright red of a raspberry coulis. And they were arranged on the plate in an orderly, geometric, harmonious manner. Beauty was a prerequisite for every tasting.

At the beginning of this millennium, Catalan Ferran Adria, in point ten of Bulli's manifesto, invited cooks to go beyond the tyranny of sight and taste. He asked them to focus equally on three historically neglected senses: smell, touch and hearing. Except for a few timid attempts in the early days, the invitation has remained virtually unheeded: objectively speaking, very few chefs today think about making inroads into the nose, fingertips and ears of those sitting at the table. But the challenge could open up interesting horizons and possibilities, not only for the kitchen.

We realised this on Tuesday 6th December, during an extraordinary eyes-closed dinner orchestrated at I Tigli in San Bonifacio by host Simone Padoan and Salvatore Vaccaro, press office for important chefs and pizzaioli in Rome like Gabriele Bonci, Gianfranco Pascucci and Pierdaniele Seu. Originally from Crotone, Vaccaro has been blind since birth. He organises these blind events to raise awareness of a disability that is still talked about too little and to bring together people held back by hard-to-die taboos. A professional with a rare intelligence and irony. We will return to this after the chronicle of the evening...


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Gabriele Zanatta
source: https://www.identitagolose.com/sito/en/98/32422/zanattamente-buono/revelations-from-a-blind-dinner.html

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