Hometown report: Chinese duck stomach, the Nobel prize and the science of pain receptors.
In this post we start off with the death of a Swedish inventor and end up discovering “new mouthfeels” at a Chinese restaurant north of Stockholm. It's also includes an amazing recipe.
“Creamy, crisp, greasy, moist, chewy, dense, flaky: at first glance, we tend to interpret the term ‘mouthfeel’ as a description of the inherent texture of a food. But when the term is used by specialists, it’s more about a relationship: how the physical structure of the food interacts with our mouths–and our minds. What makes it so complicated, in part, is the complicated nature of those interactions, no matter how mechanical or unconscious they may be. “Biting, chewing, swallowing, we experience all these things many many times everyday without thinking about them. But they’re wonderfully rich and the moment you start to think about them, it gets really complex.”
In posts named “Hometown report” I will use events from Stockholm as a starting point and then it goes on, sometimes it takes unexpected twists and turns. Like this week, where we start off with the death of a Swedish inventor and end up discovering “new mouthfeels” at a Chinese restaurant in a shopping mall north of Stockholm.
April 12, 1888, Ludvig Nobel dies in Cannes, France. Something that attracts the attention of the newspapers. But some of them mistook Ludvig for his little brother Alfred, and one of them wrote an obituary stated, “Le marchand de la mort est mort” (“The merchant of death is dead.”) “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.”
Seeing his own obituary makes Alfred, the inventor of dynamite, wonder how he will be remembered after his death.
He decides to rewrite his will in which he stated that almost all of his fortune should go “to a fund, the interest on which is distributed annually as a reward to those who have done the greatest service to humanity during the past year.”
And his biggest invention was born. The Nobel Prize.
But it could have ended differently. When Alfred Nobel died at his home in San Remo, Italy on December 10, 1896 and his will was published, many people opposed it. Not least the French state, which thought France should be considered his homeland and the money would fall to the French state.
But Alfred's two Russian stallions would stop that from happening.