No. 62 Roasted Chestnuts is the third vol. of the Hong Kong Collection, after No. 60 852 Concrete and No. 61 852 Orchid. On the streets here it is a familiar smell: winter hawkers selling roasted chestnuts in a brown paper bag (the leftest item in above photo) alongside sweet potatoes and salt-baked quail eggs, the kind of scent that tells you the season has turned before the weather quite has.
Gourmand notes are difficult because they have to be three-dimensional. You know how chestnut tastes, but taste does not translate directly into smell, and a tasty note only appears once a whole profile of compounds is standing together. Chestnut is unlike other nuts. Its scent sits closer to sweet potato and starchy roots, and starch is not an easy thing to build. It is not ricey, only full of volume, and working on it around the same time as the first Iris Ensata helped, since some orris materials give exactly that kind of body. Lactones added a slight fatty roundness, and a few materials were inspired by Cornfields, guaiac among them, which is what gives the fragrance its autumn-winter feeling.
Pear was there for sweetness, kept from becoming too sweet, while the smoke still had to carry a caramelised tastiness, in the manner of the Maillard reaction, so the roast would read as food rather than only as fire.
Making it, I was reminded how flexible chestnut is as a cooking ingredient. It goes into cake, into chicken in Chinese cuisine, into rice, and in recent years so many restaurants have used it in one way or another that finding scent references was never difficult. Even so, the truest one remained the simple paper pack just off the charcoal, piping hot. Split the shell and the steam is the chestnut, with nothing added. That same steam has a chocolatey, leathery scent I had not paid very deep attention to before, which was a pleasant surprise, and the reason a subtle leather note found its way in.
Now I am going to spam you all with all chestnut foods I have encountered while making the scent!
Jo
A stall selling chestnut themed foods in Japan
Chinese cuisine - chestnuts cooked with chicken in a pot!
Chinese dessert - Chestnut Sweet Soup
Mont Blanc!
Limited Edition Haagen Daz Chestnut Tart Ice cream!
