Sensory Overload: Tasteful Terms: Flavorful Words

Astringent refers to bitter or sour flavors that make your mouth pucker. This makes sense, since it comes from astringere, the Latin verb for "to pull together" or "to tighten". A little astringency can sometimes be a good thing, like in sour candies or bitter coffee, but too much is... too much.

Piquant flavors are sharp, tangy, or spicy. It comes from the French piquer, meaning "to prick". That's the same root that brought us pique, as in something that spurs your interest, and also pique as in "a fit of pique" meaning a temper tantrum. So piquant food is the opposite of bland: it gets your attention.

Rotten, putrid, spoiled, rank — rancid means all of these. Rancid is most often used to refer to oxidized fats; cooking oil, for instance, can become bitter and foul-tasting if left exposed to air for too long, and eating it is not good for you. Rancid is also the name of a punk band from California.

Saccharine, the name given to a low-calorie sugar substitute, as an adjective refers to something — not a food — so sickly sweet that you can't stand it, like an annoying love song or an over-the-top romance movie. If you're into chemistry, you'll see words like polysaccharide, which refers to carbohydrates made of many sugars linked in a row, in your studies. That's because saccharum was Middle Latin, via Greek, for sugar.

Savory often refers to dishes that are not desserts, as in the main part of most meals where sweetness is a minor player in the flavors. The Japanese word umami has become popular recently to refer to foods that possess this "fifth taste", among them mushrooms, aged cheeses like parmesan, fish sauce, meats, soy sauce, tomato paste, and other savory flavor boosters. Savory is also the name of an herb.

Succulent doesn't really refer to a flavor — although it definitely means good to eat — but more to a state of extreme juiciness. Think about anything from a perfectly ripe peach to a dripping morsel of roast pork: if it makes juices run down your chin, it's succulent.

Vapid, which can mean "lightweight" or "empty" when referring to a person or work of art, becomes a synonym for "bland" when used to describe food. Vapidus in Latin means "flavorless" or "insipid", another great word for describing something that's not at all great.