We were sat at work today chewing the fat, by which I was probably attempting to pass on wonderful pearls of wisdom to the new members of the team that started this year, but in all likelihood was just waffling on like a boring old man, when we alighted on the topic of smells.
One of the team has fallen down a rabbit hole on the topic of pomanders, and in order to get a better sense of what they were and how they worked, has decided to try out some ‘vintage’ smells and perfumes…like civet and ambergris (both in synthetic form BTW). Our conversation meandered here, there and everywhere, riffing on the theme of smells and tastes, and how you can totally alter the sense of a dish by playing with the smell and colour not just the taste.
We talked about smells that transport you to a place or time, both good and bad, and how when thinking about food and meals, it’s more often than not the smell that you recall first rather than the taste.
As we’d started the conversation on smells and perfumes, it wasn’t long before we wer onto the subject of modern perfumes, after shaves and such like and how all pervading they are in our lives today…just walk down a crowded street today and you’re assaulted by an olfactory barrage of Marc Jacobs, Paco Rabanne, Hugo Boss, and the ever-present Lynx Africa!!
Tis the Season
As the conversation moved through smells and into the costs and availability of some of these perfume ingredients, yes civet, storax, and benzoin I’m looking at you, a sudden thought crossed my mind. Every year at about this time (late November to early December) we’ll be sat watching something on the TV at home, a perfume commercial will come on starring some overly attractive personality , doing something ridiculous with an eagle or an arrow or suchlike, and my wife will, without fail, say “must be almost Christmas then”, as if perfume adverts were a seasonal thing…but they always used to be, and that point today blew the minds of the new, young (painfully young) members of the team today.
In their training so far, they’ve already got the fact that fruits and veg are seasonal, but there were so many other things historically that were impacted by the seasons, like milk, and meat and it’s only in the really recent past that many of those have become year round products. When we talk to families in the kitchens at Hampton Court, we commonly use the example of strawberries, and the fact that thanks to world trade and modern farming methods, if you want strawberries tomorrow, you can probably find them in the shops…grown in glasshouses or imported from hotter climates, possibly not as sweet and tasty as the summer crops we may remember from our youths, but available none the less. That wasn’t always the case, and the conversation on smell brought home to me that maybe even 15 years ago, we didn’t see advertising for perfumes and after shaves year round, or at least in the quantity we do today. Smellies were a seasonal thing, you bought them as a gift for Christmas, so that’s when the bulk of the advertising was.
Did we only smell in the winter? Did we make the bottles last all year? What volume of sales were spread through the year compared to that Christmas boom time that must have been there if the volume of pre Xmas adds were reflective of a potential market?
So driving home tonight, my mind has been mulling over what other products in the past may have had been seasonal, even though there is no logical (to us today) reason for it?
More food for thinking about in future searches through accounts and records I suppose!
I’ll leave you with some of the seasonal joys of the seventies/eighties that sprang onto our screens at this time of the year. No particular reason for the selection, just the ones that are so ingrained in the memory. Warning, may (do) contain casual everyday sexism and bigotry, sorry!
TTFN
