END OF THE NOSE?
Cooking a curry recipe from the restaurant group Dishoom’s cookbook on the first night of a Norfolk holiday last July, Barney Child noticed something odd. ‘The recipe calls for huge amounts of garlic, like crazy amounts. But the smell of the garlic was completely weird. I thought it must be old garlic or, maybe because I’d cut so much up, I’d freaked my brain out. Then the next morning I made an espresso and it smelled very, very strange – a kind of chemical smell that’s hard to describe.’
Child (not his real name) is a restaurant wine buyer who lives by his sense of smell, and not just because it’s how he pays the bills. ‘I get so much joy from thinking about food, it’s a whole day looking at recipes, thinking about what do we eat tonight.’
He caught Covid-19 in the first half of March 2020 and lost his sense of smell completely. Three weeks later, over a slice of Comté cheese, it began to return, patchily at first, but after a week, ‘I thought I was over it; my sense of smell was almost completely back’.
Unfortunately, he
