This is part of a series of activities you can explore on #TasteandSmell Day, September 14, and any day.

One of the significant challenges of the experience of smell loss is what and how to cook. A new cookbook, Cooking with a smell loss, offers guidance and recipes.  

Lead author Alexander Fjaeldstad, MD, PhD is a physician and founder of the first Danish clinic for Smell and Taste Disturbances at Goedstrup Regional Hospital, Denmark. Since its inception in 2016, they’ve seen more than 2500 patients. Fjaeldstad shares “It frustrated me as a clinician that I was not able to give good, well-tested advice to patients on how to alleviate the most common complaint ‘How can I regain pleasure from eating?’”

This frustration led to a cooking school project, which has evolved over the course of three years into free, five-week courses for patients with smell loss are conducted several times during the year, and supported by the Velux Foundation. The main focus is highlighting the different sensory food perceptions patients with a reduced or absent sense of smell can still register. 

Not only does this book offer recipes, it offer guidance on ways to adapt one’s cooking.  Says Fjaeldstad, “The perception of flavor is a combined result of several senses, where both smell and taste play an important role. Based on our experiences from cooking with patients with smell loss, proper attention to the sense of taste and mouthfeel is key to achieving a pleasurable dish, when the sense of smell is affected.”

Create a Taste Kit

One of the key recommendations of the book is the creation of a “taste kit.” Fjaeldstad explains, “The taste kit includes most of the basic tastants (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami) and a bit of trigeminal strength as well.”

The book suggests that you place the kit next to the stove, “so the last minutes of cooking become dedicated to reaching a balance between all basic tastants in the meal.”

“By training with the taste kit, participants increase their ability to optimize the flavoring of the food with all basic tastants (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami). When consciously considering texture, temperature, trigeminal strength, and tactility in any given dish, the missing input from smells becomes less important.”

Here are some good examples of the contents of a sensory taste kit for flavoring:  

Excerpt From: Alexander Fjaeldstad, Rasmus Bredahl & Christian Bøjlund. “Cooking with a smell loss.” Apple Books. https://books.apple.com/us/book/cooking-with-a-smell-loss/id6450322002 

Cooking with a smell loss include many tested recipes. Fjaeldstad’s personal favorite is the cauliflower dish on the front cover. He says, “it is for me a great addition as a side dish for many different meals. With the Chimichurri, Feta spread, and roasted nuts, the mixing of textures and flavors continues at the dinner table.”