Bitterness

TASTES HAVE PERSONALITIES—or so their usage in language implies—and bitter, rather unfairly, gets the roughest treatment. Nature and experience helped shape our biological behavior, and we’ve evolved to be bitter-taste averse. Out of the nearly 56,000 recipes I surveyed from online databases, only 0.8% used the word “bitter.” With language and nature both priming us against this taste, bitter tastes are indeed harder to sell, and our approach is to treat them just like the bitter medicine pill that must be coated with something sweet to make it more palatable. For most of us, bitterness is the one taste we often try to either remove, mask, or mellow when we cook. When we describe recipes or talk about food, we often tend to describe vegetables such as bitter greens as tasting “sweet” even if this sweetness is extremely mild or unnoticeable to our taste buds, and we are sometimes instructed to massage kale leaves with the goal of making them taste sweet. As a kid, much to the vexation of my parents, I struggled to appreciate the taste of bitter foods like bitter melon—or karela, as it is known in Hindi. But I quickly learned to appreciate the taste of chocolate and coffee as long as they were mixed with some other ingredients, like a sweetener to mellow out their intensely bitter taste.