Matters of Taste.(Book Review)

"It's hard to understand how something that tastes sweet in one person's mouth, in another person's mouth can taste so bitter," a friend tells Abe Opincar, whose memoir, Fried Butter (Soho), explores the ways in which memory dictates gustatory preference. For others, it's a matter of social class. In Rosemary and Bitter Oranges (Scribner), Patrizia Chen's grandfather banned onions and garlic for their rusticity; years later, Chen served him a dish laced with the forbidden seasonings. He praised her culinary genius. "But Nonno never found out about my Machiavellian deviousness," she writes. "I loved him too much to show him, at the end of his life, how his inflexibility had deprived him of one of life's great pleasures."

In South India, as Shoba Narayan relates in her memoir Monsoon Diary (Villard), food is enriched by ritual ...