My friend Aisha has a new theory: instead of suppressing the craving for a slice of chocolate cake, smell it. Fool the brain into thinking that chocolate cake will soon be consumed and the craving goes away; the brain isn’t all that smart, she says. She got the idea from a sitcom, where lean, muscular thirty-somethings lounge on a bench outside a bakery, inhaling the aroma of oven-fresh goodies while sipping on their low-fat soy milk lattes.

The theory, coming from a serial dieter and derived from a sitcom, may not be exactly foolproof. But I do think she’s on to something. Scientists say the tongue can only detect five kinds of taste, while our sense of smell can perceive approximately 10,000 different aromas. Flavour, therefore, is a combination of taste and smell. When you get a cold, for example, food tastes bland because the nose is blocked up.

But it takes more than a whiff of yum to satiate appetite or craving. The smell of daal tadka – onions and cumin frying in oil – makes my mouth water; I don’t just want to sniff the daal, I want to decant it into a bowl and slurp up big spoonfuls. Any form of baking too – whether it’s yeasty, buttery, laced with vanilla or chocolate – wafting warm from an oven makes me want to stuff hefty slices into my mouth. But then my willpower isn’t that good.

The good folk at Disney figured this out years ago and came up with something called the ‘smellitizer’. Artificial aromas are dispersed through vents to recreate familiar, seductive scents. So the bakery on Main Street, Disneyland, disperses the smell of chocolate chip cookies, while peppermint floats from the candy shop. Diabolical, huh? Those Mickey Mouse ears are clearly satanic symbols.

But a seductive food smell also does more than provoke a food binge, it evokes memory. Apparently, the pleasure and memory parts of the brain are closely linked with the portion that sorts through the catalogue of smells. Of course, scientists could tell me anything, given that I don’t know the difference between a hypothalamus and hypochondria. But I do trust Marcel Proust, who wrote:

…the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

Warm baking smells takes me back to my childhood when my mother made jam, chocolate, and peanut butter biscuits, and soft, spongey birthday cakes daubed thick with butter-cream icing. I guess, for me, they represent celebration, security, and love – things that tend to get complicated as one gets older. Similarly, the strong, bitter scent of coffee brewing takes me back to the adventure of summer vacations; the smell of lasooran ka achaar reminds me of my grandmother, who made it in huge glazed earthenware pots. I don’t even know what it’s called in English, and because its bitterness is an acquired taste, I suppose that’s why I haven’t seen the commercial variety in shops either. It is a condiment condemned to memory.

Itinerant nostalgia aside, it’s ironic that not everything that smells bad, tastes good: cabbage, for example, certain cheeses or sulphurous boiled eggs. Blogger Peter Cherches puts it more pithily:

There are plenty of foods that taste better than they smell. Walk into the lobby of an apartment building full of Eastern European immigrants; you'll forget for a minute that cabbage can actually taste good.

Wake up and smell the gorgonzola.

Roses smell divine, but you wouldn’t put them in a salad. Apparently, our sense of smell is a function of evolutionary survival, to tell whether food has gone bad or is safe to eat. Similarly, pregnant women have a heightened sense of smell so they can protect their foetuses. But that doesn’t explain why the aroma of sesame oil from a colleague’s lunch salad sent me retching in the office bathroom when I was pregnant. I guess one man’s poison is another man’s perfume.

So, I pose to you the question: what’s your favourite or least favourite food smell and why?