On Market Smells

The thing nobody warns you about, when you walk into an old market for the first time, is that the air does most of the work.

In the outer alleys of Tsukiji at six in the morning, the air carries dried fish and propane and the woody char of grills that have been on for thirty years. In the back of the Sant'Ambrogio market in Florence, the air carries cured pork and lemon peel and the wet-stone smell of greens that arrived from a hillside two hours ago. You can keep your eyes closed in either market and know exactly where you are.

There is no equivalent in a supermarket. The supermarket has been engineered to smell like nothing. This is, I think, the single largest difference between cooking from a market and cooking from a chain: the smell does the suggesting. You walk in without a plan. You leave with one.

The cook who shops by smell is a different cook from the cook who shops by list. The cook who shops by smell will buy the wrong thing twice a year and the right thing the rest of the time, and the right thing — the thing the market chose for them — will almost always be better than what they would have written down.