Stroopwafel

Gezellig has no English equivalent.

Dutch keeps one untranslatable word for a warmth that is inviting and convivial, comfortable and sociable at once, and years in Amsterdam went into rendering it. A gourmand wrapped in that word rather than flavoured with it. A seventeenth-century canal house over coffee, tulips on the table, oakwood floors just polished. Vanilla and caramel come off the baked waffle cookie, dense and buttery. Espresso cuts the sugar back, and amber and musk round the end. Outside, a cool North Sea breeze. Inside, the fireplace is going, and its wood smoke settles over the sweetness.

Scent Trunk commissions its fragrances one at a time from independent noses working across the world, and prints their names on the page beside the work. It looks for cultural heterogeneity and industry experience, and works with the self-taught as readily as the academically trained, the bootstrapping entrepreneur as readily as the corporate nose. Each year it also picks unconventional noses, chefs or writers or musicians with an exceptional creative streak.

Most releases name one material as their focus and one place as their provenance, and each carries a signed passage in which the person who made it says what they were after. Winternights is hay cured on Swedish poles. Tears and Smiles is pineapple cake and oolong in Taiwan. Stroopwafel is a canal house in Amsterdam with tulips on the table. The material and the place come first, and the writing follows them.