ok - a piece of cheese on its own is not savory. however in french onion soup it adds to the beef and carmalized onions to make a savory dish.

Thanks, Sox!

Jesse, my work angst is directed at the new teacher who Will. Not. Shut. Up. during student assemblies. Every time the dean makes a comment, Annoying!Teacher feels the need to add her two cents. Shutupshutupshutupshutuphutup!

I think of sweet and savory as antonyms. So yeah, savory encompasses a wider range of specific flavors (since you pretty much only get "sweet" from sugar in some form or another, but savory can come from almost anything else).

a piece of cheese on its own is not savory

And I'd disagree with this, since a cheese course can be considered "a savory" in the same way a dessert course is considered "a sweet."

Lemme see if I can find that Gourmet article about sweet/savory from a few years back.

Lemme see if I can find that Gourmet article about sweet/savory from a few years back.

Excellent!

All hail the great Google!

The savory is a little bite of something rich, salty, and piquant—a marrow toast, perhaps, or a stuffed egg, a talmouse (a kind of cheese tartlet), or a potted lobster. It was placed here and there in a meal that could run to as many as 12 different courses, but it eventually found its place at the very end. Very simply put, this allowed the gentlemen, if they wished, to eschew the sweet and round off the meal with something that was less cloying and led the palate more directly to the glass of brandy and the after-dinner cigar. Conversely, it was generally felt that the ladies ought to skip the savory and take the sweet. This naturally led to coffee in the drawing room, away from the fumes of alcohol and tobacco, where—as wine authority Darrell Corti recently pointed out to me—they could have first crack at the bathroom.

You are right with the exact definition Jessica - it is just ore the way I use the word. with a piece of cheese I have other words I'd use -nutty, earthy , etc. So I think I use savory when there are more different flavors to describe.

savory == umami

Isn't there a difference between the definition of savory-the-flavor and savory-the-dinner-course, though? The former seems to me both more limited and harder to describe.

umami

No, YOU mami.

Isn't there a difference between the definition of savory-the-flavor and savory-the-dinner-course, though?

In my head (which means it must me true!), savory the flavour is used when it's something that could be either sweet or not, and usually involves flavouring with herbs.

Then we could get into the herb summer savoury, and totally confuse things. My mom buys Newfoundland savoury to put in her turkey stuffing.