Our common nature is a musical journey with Yo-Yo Ma and me, Ana Gonzalez, through this complicated country.

We go into caves, onto boats, and up mountain trails to meet people, hear their stories, their poetry, and of course, play some music, all to reconnect to nature, and get closer to the things we're missing.

Listen to our common nature from WNYC wherever you get podcasts.

Hey, it's Francis Lamb and this is Splendid Table Select, our mini podcast on the stuff that makes us better cooks and eaters.

Have you ever heard the thing about how smell is 70% of flavor? I have no idea how that number actually got worked out, but here's a fun test. Go get

yourself a jelly bean. No, seriously, do it. Like pause the podcast and come back when you got it.

All right. Now, pinch your nose shut and eat the jelly bean with your nose pinched.

You're chewing, you're chewing. What flavor is it?

Okay, now let go your nose.

Amazing, right?

This is where Mandy Aftel comes in.

She makes perfume out of natural essential oils,

but she's lived behind the legendary restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley for years,

so a long time ago, she started wondering how she could use her skills and her perfume ingredients in cooking. The writer and producer Jennifer Ait Lee met up

with Mandy in San Francisco, and this is what they talked about.

Mandy, it's good to meet you in person. Hello. Hello. So your book highlights five sort of landmark

flavors. And why did you use these five? Well, these five aromas are really almost like a gateway

drug, a gateway aroma to certain very deep human appetites that have been with us since kind of the beginning of time with

man. And they're very interesting ways that we've had of both bringing a Roma into our lives,

but also bringing certain kind of emotional states into our lives. And they were very,

very important in how we develop. So the first one is cinnamon. And it's all about the spice root and things that are exotic and far away that we can bring home, that have those sharp, strange tastes that are very intense, that are used for cooking but also used for perfume.

And cinnamon is kind of my main one, my rock star of the spices, and it's just was so far away and so exotic and people had

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