Savory or Sweet?

I was in our soul food kitchen this evening, making up a batch of tchina or tahini. Sometimes I start from roasting raw sesame seeds. Sometimes, I use any number of the amazing tahini pastes available here in Tel Aviv. Amd as I hoovered the sauce into one of our ridiculously oversized containers, I caught myself licking out the remnants of the bowl.

Well, that’s, as my mom used to say a long time ago, a prevarication. I was actually licking every damn thing that had come in contact with the tachina: the bowl, the rubber spatula, the soup ladle I use to transfer goodly quantities of the stuff from one tub to another, the fork that did the stirring. You name it. I was freaking all over it.

And then the thought came to me: I have never, I mean never, been one to seek out the remnant drippings of a sweet dessert —- brownie mix detritus, cookie dough, you name it. I’m not interested. But savory shit like tchina? I’m all over it. Literally. And so the question popped into my head: Are people more likely to die from binging on sweet stuff or savory (read: salty?). The Big Question is not, asw the classic Hebrew text has it (and popularized by the Leonard Cohen song) “Who By Fire.” The Big Question is “Who By Savory, Who By Sweet.

I think the whole enchilada comes down to the maturation of tastes. When we are young, we prefer sweet. When we age, things more piquant. We prefer sweeter wines in our youth; the subtler flavors come with time. Ketchup is the condiment of childhood, dijon mustard and beyond the thing of later years. And so on.

This is obviously not a hard and fast rule, of course. My dad, in the waning years of his life, drifted back to the sweet tastes of his childhood, craving things like chocolate shakes. And maybe that captures the essence of it all, a journey of tastes that is not linear but rather circles back on itself, not a trajectory from sweet into sharp, but rather a journey that taken in toto, is one tapestry of umami.