Photo: Alonso Nichols

THE EDITORIAL WE

Piece of Cake

One thing I’ve learned from The Great British Baking Show, aside from how much fun it would be to cook under a big tent on an English country estate instead of in my little kitchen, is how hard it is to judge a cake. Before TGBBS, it was enough for the cake to taste good. Now one worries about the “bake”—about the crumb, the moisture, and (if yeast is involved) whether the confection was adequately proofed. Are the layers even? Is the glaze too thin? The tiniest flaw will be caught by the show’s stern but reasonable judges. And from now on, I’ll notice these things, too, as will millions of other viewers.

In that respect, cake appreciation is just like any other form of expertise. An expert learns to spot the relevant variables: which properties of a thing are available to be noticed and which ones are worth paying attention to. Whether in aesthetics or anesthesiology, it’s not so much what you know that counts as what you notice.

Ages ago, I taught music appreciation to undergraduates. To my surprise, these bright students often had trouble describing what they were listening to, except in the vaguest terms. Then they’d discover the building blocks of music-concepts like pitch, timbre, meter, rhythm, harmony, and form—and suddenly they’d have a vocabulary for thinking about music and noticing differences. No longer could they claim of Baroque or blues, “It all sounds alike.”

Wine is the same way. Connoisseurs don’t just “like” a wine. They pay attention to color, aroma, taste, and finish, and parse out all those flavor components you read about on the bottle—“notes of cinnamon, cloves, pepper,” and all that. I doubt it takes superhuman powers to detect such characteristics, but most people don’t think to look for them, and consequently miss enjoying the complex package of sensations a fine wine has to offer.

Science, of course, is built upon just this sort of informed observation. The colors of stars, the spots on a butterfly wing, the temperature of an ocean current—to the person who is trained to notice them, these variables are important. Often vitally so. In the hen scratching of an EKG, for example, a cardiologist divines T waves and U waves and Q waves (whatever those may be) and homes in on irregularities, potentially saving a life.

But noticing can just as easily be a curse. I once asked a discerning Hollywood director if he enjoyed watching movies. “When they’re good,” he replied. “Otherwise I fixate on everything that’s wrong.” He reminded me of my dermatologist friend who can diagnose almost any skin disease in about three seconds—which puts her in the awkward position of noticing sometimes dire conditions in strangers on the street.

If I had to choose, I’d rather be a noticer. Wouldn’t you? Fewer Victoria sponge cakes will meet our rising standards, but the ones that do will be sublime.

—DAVID BRITTAN
EDITOR