‘Covid killed my taste buds – then my business’

Raisa Ali was forced to stop giving Indian cooking lessons because she could no longer taste or smell all the ingredients

Raisa Ali never fully recovered her sense of taste and smell after contracting Covid (Collect/PA Real Life)

A cooking teacher who lost her sense of taste and smell and “never fully recovered” after catching Covid last summer has decided to shut her business because she can no longer gauge the quantity needed or quality of ingredients in her dishes.

Raisa Ali, 51, said to continue teaching people how to cook Indian food would be like “the blind leading the blind” as her sense of taste and smell have never been the same since she caught Covid in July 2022.

The mother-of-three, who lives in Kingston, south London, knew “something was missing” after her husband Akbar, 52, and her students found she was being heavy-handed with the spices but could not tell the difference.

Raisa made the difficult decision to close her Sweet Sultry Spice cooking school after teaching a class how to make the Indian spice mix garam masala and realising that, while she knew the recipe from memory, she could not smell the pungent ingredients.

Covid has “killed the joy of cooking” and dried up her source of income, but Raisa has now accepted what happened and is looking for a fresh start.

Raisa, who has three sons, twins Zain and Zakir, 16, and Yusuf, 19, said: “I can’t dwell on this anymore and just have to move forward.

“My main mode of cooking and learning and teaching has been to follow my nose.

“I used to make my students take whiffs of everything at every stage.

“I decided to close the school because when I lost my sense of taste and smell, my passion died.

“Covid killed the most important part of food for me.”

Raisa started giving cooking classes in her kitchen after completing a nutrition course in 2018 and taking advice from a friend.

“I did a one-year nutrition course and started working online, trying to build a small business, but it wasn’t going anywhere and I was feeling very isolated,” she said.

“A friend of mine came over and said ‘you’re doing it all wrong, why don’t you just open a cooking school’.

“I was scared but she was like ‘feel the fear and just do it anyway.”

She soon found herself giving two or three classes per week to groups of around five people for between £60 and £70, teaching them to cook Indian cuisine.

“People would come over to my house and they wouldn’t leave – it was great,” said Raisa who moved to the UK in 2008 after her husband was transferred to the country for work.

“It was a really great experience and then when it went away, I just thought now what am I going to do?”

Just when her budding business started taking off, bringing in between £500 and £800 per month, Covid struck.

“Suddenly Covid’s happening and from one day to the next the business totally died,” she said.

“The income that I had was gone and everything that I had built was gone.

“I spent that first year (2020) feeling sorry for myself.”

Then while travelling back to her native California, in July 2022, Raisa caught Covid and spent two weeks in bed.

“I spent the first two weeks in bed and then started to recover slowly,” she said.

“When I came back, I had brain fog, I couldn’t smell things properly and I couldn’t taste things properly.”

She noticed her taste buds were not firing on all cylinders after eating some tortilla chips which tasted like “cardboard”.

“I’m eating them and thinking, I don’t understand, what is this?” she said.

“And it has just never come back properly.”

While Raisa started to recover after spending two weeks in bed, some of her symptoms lingered for months.

Once lockdown rules lifted, Raisa went back to giving cooking classes, but it was not the same.

In January 2023, while teaching a group how to make garam masala from scratch, Raisa’s sense of smell was put to the test.

“When they could smell it across the room then I knew, at that point, that this wasn’t going to work for me because it would be like the blind leading the blind,” she said.

“I remember telling my customers, look I’m telling you everything from memory and my past experience because I don’t have have my sense of taste and smell.

“Isn’t that depressing?”

On another occasion, she was cooking a chicken dish and a student asked about the ingredients but Raisa could not “taste anything”.

“It turned out it was black pepper but I couldn’t even taste it,” she said.

Her husband and children also started picking up on strong flavours which appeared relatively mild to her.

“I knew something was missing because when I cooked things for my husband he would say ‘oh, you put a lot of this in’,” Raisa said.

“But I could not tell the difference.”

Even to this day, Raisa says she has not fully recovered her sense of taste and smell.

“If I would sum it up, Covid killed the joy,” she said.

“I just feel like I don’t want to bother anymore because I feel like my drive is gone.

“So I decided, either I can be upset about it or I can reinvent myself again.”

Raisa has decided to see her Covid nightmare as a positive step towards new beginnings.

“If you are cooking something, you have to be able to smell and taste the ingredients and I knew I couldn’t do that so I decided it was time for a complete shift,” she said.

She has not been to see a doctor about her long-lasting symptoms as she believes there are many other people who are “far worse off” and that the NHS already has “too much on its plate”.

She is now looking to explore other business opportunities which do not rely on having a sense of taste and smell.

“Sustainable living” is one area in which Raisa is particularly interested, but what this will look like in practice remains to be seen.

“I want to get rid of my carbon footprint,” she said.

“I don’t need to prove anything to anyone, it’s just what I want to do.”

For more information about next steps, follow Raisa on Instagram.