Take a lick of vanilla ice cream: sweet and cool, as expected, but with little fragrance. Surprising, since vanilla normally has such a distinctive scent. But wait a beat; then suddenly there’s the familiar aroma, the one that, if you go back long enough, schoolgirls once used as perfume.
That wait was just long enough to allow all hell to break loose inside your mouth. The ice cream is now literally exploding. Air bubbles are bursting from the heat of your tongue. A volatile compound, in this case vanillin, is boiling. Sweet scents are wafting their way up your nasal cavities, where olfactory cells send your brain the belated good news.
Take another lick, and touch off another explosion.
Ice cream is virtually the only food we eat frozen, which means that its flavor, which we define as a composite of taste and smell, is only fully released upon melting, ...
