Food for thought

My guess is that not many people reading this ate flampoyntes for their Christmas dinner. This pork and cheese pie, commonly enjoyed during the medieval yuletide, combines those ingredients with sugar, ginger and cinnamon. No thanks, you might say. But why not? Why do some combinations of flavours strike us as appealing and others as peculiar?

We seem to be rather conservative about this. From the astronomical number of possible mixtures of ingredients (a conservative estimate is 10¹⁵ for an average eight ingredients per dish), we select just a million or so worldwide. Admittedly, there’s probably not enough time to cook up even a fraction of those options. But what makes us instinctively wary of such innovations as the ’liver in lager’ offered by Timothy Spall’s eccentric cook Aubrey in Mike Leigh’s film Life is Sweet?