I have been trying to describe one specific smell for two years. Professionally, because we are building scents at Ecoand and I keep using this one as a reference the perfumers cannot smell. Personally, for reasons that are obvious.
My grandmother's kitchen in Taipei smells like: rice steam, soy sauce that has been cooked into the walls over decades, sesame oil, the faint mineral cold of the tile floor, and something green — scallions mostly, but also the damp vegetable smell of things washed and waiting in a colander. Over it all, very faint, the specific plastic-and-circuitry warmth of a rice cooker that has been running twice a day since before I existed.
I visited in April. The kitchen is unchanged, which in Taipei, a city that renovates like it's a sport, amounts to a small act of resistance.
The kitchen is not preserved. It is simply still in use. Those are different things, and the smell knows the difference.
That distinction matters. A preserved kitchen — cleaned, frozen, curated — would smell like nothing within a year. This one smells like itself because the soy sauce is still being cooked, the rice cooker still runs, the scallions are still waiting in the colander. The smell is not a residue of the past. It is the exhaust of an ongoing life.
This is why the scent project keeps failing, I think. We keep trying to bottle the result, when the smell is actually a process. You cannot manufacture thirty years of lunches. The best a bottle can do is rhyme with it — get close enough that someone's memory does the remaining work. Version nine of the third scent direction gets the rice steam and misses the tile. Version ten will probably get the tile and lose the rice.
My grandmother, for the record, finds the entire project hilarious. She has offered, twice, to just cook.