The American sociologist Gary Alan Fine has studied professional kitchens and described the work of chefs as ranging from that of artist to that of manual labourer. Other descriptions he used include professional, business man, a craftsperson, a scientist, a humanist and a philosopher (1996). Naturally, not all chefs can be considered artists, but it has been argued that to describe Ferran Adria, Heston Blumenthal, Pierre Gagniere or Alain Ducasse as mere cooks would be akin to describing Dali as just a painter or Mozart as a pianist \cite{Mac_Con_Iomaire_2005}. In 2007, Adria was invited to exhibit at Documenta 12 but instead of traveling to Kassel, Germany, for the 100 day art fair, he provided a table for two at his Costa Brava restaurant El Bulli each day for randomly chosen Documenta 12 guests, who were given air fare for the 1,000 mile journey. This became known as the `G' pavilion. Adria noted that ``Cooking cannot be `musified' -- it is an artistic discipline that needs its own scene'' (qtd. in \cite{Artforum_2007}). Indeed, the philosopher Terry Eagleton has noted that: ``Genuine eating combines pleasure, utility, and sociality, and so differs from a take-away in much the same way that Proust differs from a bus ticket'' \cite{Eagleton_1997}. The below will discuss the concept of the chef as artist, the signature of the individual chef on actual dishes, and the representation of the moment of tasting, emblematized by Proust's madeleine moment. Taking examples from literature, film and real life, I will argue that a discerning diner can identify the work of a master practitioner in the culinary arts using his or her taste, much as a wine connoisseur can identify a particular wine and vintage; or that a student of art history can identify the work of Degas, Renoir, Dali or Pollock.

For centuries, there has been a strong connection between food and visual art. One only has to think of the still lives from the Dutch golden age by the likes of Rembrandt and de Heem; the work of Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo whose imaginative heads were made of fruit, vegetables and fish; Van Gogh's The Potato Eaters; Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup cans; and the work of more recent contemporary artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija who has served soup at the Grand Palais in Paris and Thai curry in New York's Museum of Modern Art. English artist and Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller operated a free caf\'e serving tea in room four of the British Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale \cite{Tipton_2014}. A number of Irish artists such as Abigail O'Brien, Mary Kelly, Katharina Stover, Barbara Wolf and Fiona Hallinan have also incorporated food into their work, with one artist, Mick O'Kelly, installing a food wagon for the homeless in Dublin's Temple Bar Gallery in 2005 with his Artwork for an Imperfect World. This created a stir with critics asking was it exploitative? Or, was it even Art? \cite{Tipton_2014}

What is taste? Is it flavour plus aroma? Simon Schama, in a keynote address to the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2009, suggested that food and cooking was a performance art and questioned whether we can actually adequately write about food, likening it to both music and sex, both of which have an extensive literature. Do we have sufficient language to fully describe either, since exact repetition seldom happens in food, music or sex. Food scientist Len Fisher, quoting the philosopher Thomas Nagel's notion that subjective experiences are unique to each of us, points out that this is not just a matter of philosophy, since scientifically each individual actually tastes the same shared meal differently. In particular, humans have different