Flavor is an extremely complex fusion of senses - taste, smell, touch (pressure and temperature), electrochemistry .. even sight and sound have been shown to be involved. A bit of academic and much more commercial work has been done indicating:
° heavier bowls and spoon make yogurt taste better
° rounded plates make rice pudding taste sweeter
° angular plates bring out bitterness and work well for chocolate and deserts with a lot of coffee
° cheeses are rated saltier when eaten from a knife rather than a fork or toothpick
° music and lighting can make a big difference in taste.
° higher altitude reduces salty tastes (airline meals.. when you can get good ones these days, are exceptionally salty to balance)
° the type of music has a big impact on the taste of wine.
° and so on.. (and on and on)
It's really complicated.
Some years ago I became fascinated by something I had thought mundane. A seriously good chef had prepared a feast. Little had been spared by the hosts and all of us polished the silverware before we were served. At desert what should have been an excellent Tahitian vanilla ice cream had a distinctively metallic taste. Could it be the silver? The lighting was low, so I did what I tend to do. I took a drink of water, pulled out my pocket knife and had some of the ice cream from its stainless steel blade. Excellent! A bit more water and back to the spoon -- ugh, metallic!
Stainless steel makes a lot of sense. Working on high strength steel alloys for guns just before WWI a Sheffield metallurgist noticed a shining sample in an otherwise rusting pile of older rejected experiments. They kept careful notes and this one had some chromium. Its hardness was nothing to write home about, but the chromium formed a chromium oxide layer a few atoms thick at the surface of the steel which prevented rusting. Cut the steel and a new layer formed almost instantly. He had discovered stainless steel. The metallurgist, Harry Brearley, wondered how food would taste. He tried it and pronounced the material unreactive with food. Something better and less expensive than silver had been found.
I learned about some experiments at a materials lab in University College London and decided to experiment on my own. Early on people probably had copper and then brass cutlery .. at least in the West. Those materials, by their electrochemical potentials, react strongly with a lot of substances and would probably impart a horrible taste. The Chinese figured out the right path with chopsticks,. Single use/minimum contact or highly inert ceramics. They were millennia ahead of the rest of the world.
Iron struck me was a bad choice (oxidation) and I had read zinc, tin (certainly plated cans), chrome and - of course - gold had been used in cutlery. I plated a set of identical small spoons with various materials. Zinc was universally awful (note.. I'm a vegetarian so I didn't test with meat). Copper reacted strongly with anything acidic.. grapefruit and oranges are spectacularly bad. The silver spoon left a metallic taste with dairy and something I couldn't really identify compared to stainless. Gold was about the same as stainless for anything other than dairy or sweet. Sweet things tasted creamy and dairy tasted even creamier and richer.
Next I made a set of spoons forks and took them to a dinner with several people and a variety of foods. In general stainless came in second to gold - everyone liked sweet and dairy with gold even though they work blindfolds. There was fish and some people preferred zinc. They could certainly taste the zinc, but liked the combination. Zinc, copper and tin were universally bad with the vegetables and legumes served,.
The folks in England found the same and more. A few dinners were prepared to pair certain utensils with foods. That's way above my range, but I understand the results were so-so other than gold rules and stainless is way better than silver.
While they aren't scientific, trials like these are easy to do and you may want to try some on your own. The work out of London were a bit noisy other than the stainless and gold results. My take is you should use the least reactive utensils that are practical and if some interesting combination (zine and fish) is desired, perhaps it is better approached by seasoning and cooking technique. This does beg the larger question individual reactions and machine learning based flavors. I have an opinion, but it is time to stop.
These days I eat ice cream and sweet deserts with gold plated utensils - everything else is standard stainless or chopsticks.
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