Pizza and intuition

3 hours in the kitchen, half an hour on the table. The fate of every cook. I like to cook and we had my brother's family over for diner with all children being Yelena, Alessia, Sinja and Naomi.

While preparing the pizza dough and fooling around with bacon, salad, crème fraiche and all the other yummy ingredients for desert such as Swiss chocolate and cream for the sweet highlight of the evening, I was wondering about perfumers and cooks.

We have something in common, starting from single yet not simple ingredients, building up a blend, having it transformed by time and heat and finally have it ready and present it in a nice fashionable way to a happy consumer who has no idea what happened in the kitchen. And similar to cooking, a perfumer will have to feel how the individual ingredients fit together, how they transform each other and how time will work on the blend. There is, however, a difference: A pizza comes out of the oven, is ready to be eaten and finished within half an hour. A perfume is a pice of craftmanship which will develop over hours; every note you added will have an impact over time. In perfumery these are the challenges:
- To intuitively know how components will fit; this is experience.
- How they will develop while the maturation of the perfume before dilution; this is knowhow.
- How the final blend will develop once liberated on the skin with all factors such as humidity, body chemistry, body warmth coming into play; this is the intuition part.

Preparing pizza is easier.
(picture upper left: my brother. lower left: my friend. wine: Cour du Roy, Médoc, 2001)