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Notes -
Could they though? I am imagining a blindfolded critic being spooned with two mouthfuls, not knowing what they are going to be. With classic dishes I suppose it might work. They could say 'This tastes like lasagna. I preferred forkful A over forkful B as it tasted cheesier'. With unique dishes I don't even know what the test is supposed to look like as there will not be an obvious control dish to serve alongside it.
It certainly would be a fun scientific project to come up with ways to do this in a way that allows us to draw actually meaningful conclusions! With unique dishes, the control could just be some dish put together by an amateur based on the same ingredients (or at least the inferred ingredients). Or perhaps an amateur putting together a dish with the goal of making it taste and feel similarly to the actual dish. We'd have to actually run a study on the studies, running these studies multiple times in multiple ways, to determine which control is actually more effective as a control for the purposes of judging the unique dish.
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