So that enhanced scent might heighten our enjoyment as well.īut there's much we still don't know about how salt affects flavor, Beauchamp and Breslin both stress. In a watery food like grapefruit, the addition of salt makes it easier for volatile molecules - the chemicals responsible for odor - to launch themselves into the air, where we can breathe them in and smell them, intensifying our experience of the fragrance of the fruit. Something else might be going on, too, he says. By diminishing our tongue's ability to sense naringin and other bitter compounds, salt also produces a secondary cognitive effect, which we perceive as "a relative bump in sweetness," according to Breslin, a professor of nutrition at Rutgers University. Grapefruit is rich in bitter-tasting plant compounds, especially one called naringin. By testing the interaction between three taste sensations - salty, bitter and sweet - they found that salt increased the perception of sweetness by diminishing our ability to taste bitterness.īeauchamp, now emeritus director of Monell, explains that this is because of the ions in the salt, which block many of the receptors on our tongues that detect bitterness. It wasn't until the mid-1990s that Gary Beauchamp and Paul Breslin at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia began to unravel the complex, dynamic process through which salt transforms and enhances flavor. The science behind adding salt for sweetnessĮven as salt-makers boasted about the taste-enhancing effects of salt on grapefruit, they were at a loss to explain just why the combination worked. The campaign proved so successful that it continued into the 1950s, long after rationing had ended. Eating grapefruit with salt was a way civilians could support the war effort, both by consuming nutritious, domestically grown food, and by limiting their use of rationed sugar. "Vitamin-rich Grapefruit - a 'Victory Food Special' - is one of the fruits Uncle Sam advises you to eat," explained one 1943 ad from Morton's Salt.Īds like this made an overt appeal to patriotic sentiments. Still, this doesn't mean the chemistry between salt and grapefruit isn't real. But, like a sham romance between co-stars dreamed up by Hollywood publicity departments to boost studio revenues, the pairing of the two in midcentury advertisements seems to have largely been manufactured buzz, hyped by companies with an interest in increasing sales of both products. Turns out, grapefruit and salt did have a history together. In our candy-crushed world, these curious culinary time capsules raise the question: Does salt really make grapefruit taste sweeter? And if this practice was once common, why do few people seem to eat grapefruit this way today? The pairing, these ads swore, enhanced the flavor. And yet Americans were once urged to sweeten it with salt.Īd campaigns from the first and second world wars tried to convince us that "Grapefruit Tastes Sweeter With Salt!" as one 1946 ad for Morton's in Life magazine put it. Indeed, people often smother it in sugar just to get it down. Grapefruit's bitterness can make it hard to love.
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