They were instructed to taste the foodstuffs and to indicate whether their perception of the flavour matched more one or other of the items anchoring the scales, and then mark the appropriate point on the scale.
Basically, the syrup harvested first is the lightest, in colour as in taste, while the season's latecomer is amber verging on dark, with a robust and distinctive flavour to match.
Not long ago, craving cool-climate flavours to match the weather, I bought rye bread, creme fraiche, a smoked mackerel and red onions for pickling.
Effective aromatization of foods, including emulsion-type products, depends on the quality of flavouring and matching it well with the matrix.
"Everyone's got different receptors, so trying to make a flavouring that matches for everybody is very, very hard," she says.
But their flavour can certainly match the best fresh berries out there, for less than half price.
As a teenager, I worked in a newsagent and spent every Saturday ricocheting between tangy salt-and-vinegar Chipsticks and saccharine Bounty bars in an eight-hour flavour ping-pong match.
"Our main aim in that first season was to bring a more European flavour to the match day experience, but we couldn't let our ambitions run away," one of the founding members said in a fan forum interview.
The idea of matching flavour compounds – food pairing – has been used in molecular gastronomy for a decade or more.
The second feature in many ballet scores of the period was the attempt to compose suitably flavoured music to match the new growth of interest in national and regional dances, which were regularly incorporated into the ballets.
