At the FT, Fuschia Dunlop on the alchemy of cutlery (site registration required):
The
sight of 15 adults sucking their spoons like babies was an unusual
start to a dinner party, but they had surprisingly different flavours.
Copper and zinc were bold and assertive, with bitter, metallic tastes;
the copper spoons even smelt metallic as they gently oxidised in the
air. The silver spoon, despite its beauty, tasted dull in comparison,
while the stainless steel had a faintly metallic flavour that is
normally overlooked. As Miodownik pointed out, we were not just tasting
the spoons but actually eating them, because with each lick we were
consuming “perhaps a hundred billion atoms”.
When the spoons were tasted with food, there were some surprising
revelations. Baked black cod with zinc was as unpleasant as a fingernail
scraped down a blackboard, and grapefruit with copper was
lip-puckeringly nasty. But both metals struck a lovely, wild chord with a
mango relish, their loud, metallic tastes somehow harmonised by its
sweet-sour flavour. (“With sour foods, like mango and tamarind, you
really are tasting the metal,” says Laughlin, “because the acid strips
off a little of the surface.”) Tin turned out to be a popular match for
pistachio curry. And Laughlin sang the praises of gold as a spoon for
sweet things: “Gold has a smooth, almost creamy quality, and a quality
of absence – because it doesn’t taste metallic.”
I want to eat honey ice cream with a gold spoon...
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