In 1963, Elizabeth David suffered a cerebral haemorrhage, which affected her senses of smell and taste. For a while, she was unable to taste salt, and the smell of frying onions became so strangely amplified as to be unbearable.

Since 2019, millions of people worldwide have reported loss or impairment of taste and smell as symptoms of Covid-19. David kept her symptoms secret from all but her closest friends, possibly worried about how they might affect her career if readers knew that her principal critical and creative faculties were damaged. I hope she’d receive more sympathy today, now that so many understand a little of how it feels to lose the ability to taste.

I suppose I should also regard taste and smell as the most important facets of the world I write about. Yet, in recent years, I have become increasingly fascinated by those aspects of food appreciation that have nothing to do with physical sensation.