Flavour

Although many flavours can be described effectively for everyday purposes, usually by referring to some other flavour (‘it tastes a bit like strawberries’), a full scientific description or analysis is virtually impossible. The flavour of a single spice, which may be just one of numerous ingredients in a given dish, may embody hundreds of elements, of which some may not yet have been finally identified. For all the miraculous technology of spectroscopic analysis, there are mysteries here which will defy resolution for some time to come.