I ever tell you about the time I lost my sense of taste?
My editor will be swift to insert here a rejoinder to the effect he didn’t know I’d ever had any.
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I’m talking, though, about my actual, physical sense of taste. And smell. Completely. Gone.
It wasn’t a theatrical loss. Mild cold, congested a couple of days, then it went away—and took my taste buds and nasal receptors when it departed. We’re talking here, a total loss. As in, texture aside, I could have been eating a mouthful of warm, wet cardboard as the Naugles burrito I had for lunch. (Which should give you an idea of how long ago this was: Naugles, Del Taco, and Zantigos remain the greatest Mexican-inspired fast food contributions to St. Louis and it’s a tragedy they’ve all departed.) As in, the big jar of curry powder in the pantry I ran under my nose each day, inhaling deeply smelled like, well, nothing at all.
I talked with a neurosurgeon friend. Who, not helpfully, told me of a recent case of a woman who, while camping, fell backward off a log on which she was sitting, struck the back of her head just lightly on a stone and lost her taste and smell. Tiny nerve connections deep in the nose, he explained, were torn. And don’t grow back.
So goodbye to the aroma of daffodils in April, roasting turkey, the puckery fun of Sweetarts, and the finish of a fine Cabernet. And hello to a diet of oatmeal, boiled cabbage, and wheat germ—or whatever some dietician could tell me was best for me since it didn’t much matter.
After a week or so, I began assuming, given my predicament, that my position then, describing restaurants for the old St. Louis Weekly, would be coming to an end and I’d be looking for another job. St. Louis restaurant criticism’s loss would be the Pennsylvania Toll Booth Operators Union’s gain.
The ending of the story is, of course, a happy one. And dramatic. And evidence of a providential God if ever there was one. My parents were coming in from Boston for a visit—which meant they’d be bringing lobsters. Which meant I’d be eating lobster, lustrous with butter, that night for dinner. And it would taste like a delectably steamed bike tire.
Just before leaving to pick up my parents at Lambert, I spied an antihistamine tablet in the bathroom medicine closet. I took it, thinking it couldn’t hurt. Ten minutes later, walking into Lambert, I caught an aroma. Eau de airport. The fragrance of Lambert’s concourses, which I had never really considered before but which suddenly smelled like a bouquet of roses wrapped in fresh from the oven roast beef. With hints of Chanel Grande Extrait. By the time I got the lobsters out of the steamer in our kitchen that night, my smell and taste were probably 90% restored. My neurosurgeon friend later told me the antihistamine had probably just jiggled loose some clogged nerve endings and—problem solved.
Almost thirty years later, the aroma of Lambert Field Airport is still mouthwatering to me.
So it wasn’t the first meal I ate after regaining my taste and smell. But the second one was a dish I’d been craving, could still taste, if only in my memory, during my long (okay, a week) banishment in the gustatory desert.
Singapore noodles—if you have a taste for the flavor of irony this will not come as a surprise—have as much to do with Singapore as does toasted ravioli. How they got the name is a culinary mystery. Singapore noodles—xing zhou chao mi in Mandarin or sing jau chao mai in Cantonese—are not fine dining, Chinese cuisine-wise. They’re close to street food. They originated in southern China, probably in Hong Kong, where both noodles and adventurous explorations in cooking are popular.
What they are is noodles, thin, vermicelli-like rice noodles, called maifun, tossed with various nibbles of meat and vegetables—and most importantly, with a heaping helping of pungent, lovely, curry powder.
Singapore noodles are, like many similar dishes, amenable to some variations. Unfortunately, that makes them susceptible to excessive monkey-ing around. There are a few places in St. Louis that offer renditions of Singapore noodles that play a little too loose in this regard. A couple that render it correctly: the always wonderful Royal Chinese BBQ (dish shown above), in U City, and a little take-out place that also gets it right, China One, in Maryland Heights.
A good dish of Singapore noodles will always have slivers of char siu, pork roasted with a marinade that imparts a faintly sweet flavor to the succulent meat, then cut into tasty splinters. The dish will also have shrimp, and fat flakes of chopped fried egg. And green onions. Aside from those essentials, you might also come across slices of Chinese cabbage, green peppers, and shreds of carrot. There won’t be any liquid at all in the dish; the moisture is provided by the noodles. The curry powder, mixed in to those noodles in a searing wok after the vegetables have been sautéed, is what gives the dish its incredible aroma and nearly addictive flavor.
There are dishes that smell better than they taste. Singapore noodles taste every bit as good as they smell. Would that we could say the same about Lambert Airport.
Royal Chinese BBQ, 8406 Olive Blvd, 314-991-1888
China One, 2012 Dorsett Village, 314-542-0888
