This evening for dessert, we had at our disposal three different bars of chocolate. Inspired by Anne, we decided to have one piece of each as a chocolate tasting. Eliot took hers one at a time and chewed them up. Blaise and I tried them in order of increasing darkness, then voted on the best. Anselm took a tiny nibble of each, and, over the next half hour or more, proceeded to take more tiny nibbles but in between each bite, sat, contemplated, tried to conjure up what the flavor reminded him of, searched for words to describe it, and made notes. He was completely sincere and completely absorbed in the task. It was rather shocking, as he's never been with us to a tasting (maybe one wine-tasting but we didn't take notes!). So as far as I know, he was not modeling any behavior he's observed directly.
He has always been very sensitive to taste and to food quality. Sometimes I lose patience with him about it (one does not want to justify the provenance of tinned tomatoes to one's seven year old while making dinner). But this did take me aback-- seeing a totally unanticipated aptitude in a child, in an area one would never have thought to look for one.
2 comments:
I took a course called "The Chemistry of Chocolate" with this prof: http://www.chem.cmu.edu/groups/bernlab/
(when he was still at Princeton)
in which this kind of tasting was a weekly assignment—Anselm would have passed with flying colors!
Sounds like a rough course to study for :-)
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