Smell Of The Week (4)

Attempts to recreate the past have succeeded in reimagining the look of people and recreating how and where they lived but have rather stumbled on how things smelled. This gaping chasm in our ability to reconstruct the past might be about to be bridged by an ambitious project which goes under the banner of Odeuropa.

A group of chemists and historians have spent more than two years isolating and reproducing scents and smells associated with key places, trades, and events. In Italy teams are scouring through medical texts and cooking manuals to develop the aromas that may have emanated from kitchens while in Germany they are looking at visual representations to conjure up the smells generated by trades, habits, and diets which have long fallen out of fashion. One of the scheme’s earliest successes has been the recreation of the odour emanating from the dirty canals of old Amsterdam.

Smell is the strangest of the senses with no commonly accepted metric for judging the strength and quality of a particular aroma. At best a loose scale of relativity is used and even then one person’s perfume is another’s stench. Of course, the other problem is that our sense of smell is conditioned by the aromas we encounter around us. What we might find objectionable today may well have been deemed to have been acceptable by our ancestors.

However, it would be interesting to be exposed to the smells as well as the sights and sounds of our forefathers and the endeavours of Odeuropa might just be rewarded with the sweet scent of success.