Time-travels with food

I’m not even sure how to begin this post, I just know that I have a something that I want to say about food and memories and how food can take you away to a faraway place or bring you right to where you need to be at that very moment.

If you’re like me, you’ll have lots of fond memories of food. Some of these are about growing up and being cooked for by family and some of these are about the people, places and new experiences. The bringing together, the shared experience, it’s wonderful to be with people you care about or make new friends over food.

Childhood memories are not all semolina and strawberry jam

I’m sure not every mother is like mine, but mine had – still has – early morning tendencies of the culinary persuasion. As a child, I regularly woke to the sounds of stirring pots clattering and the smell of home cooking cascading up the stairs and into our bedrooms.  That smell taking me by the hand, leading me barefoot downstairs where I’d wearily lollop into the kitchen to steal a secret spoonful of whatever was cooking.  Now, as an adult when I visit our mum’s house, I walk through the door and am greeted by the familiar sounds, sights and smells, and I leave just a little bit of my adult self at the door.

We all have favourite foods from our childhood, flavours firmly fixed in our memory banks. Think about it for a minute. What’s yours? Was it sweet, tangy cola bottle sweets or fizzy sherbet fountains? A particular school dinner, perhaps? I loved the chocolate sponge with chocolate custard or semolina with strawberry jam. Perhaps it’s not even a favourite food, but foods that are synonymous with your childhood era, embedded in how you grew up. Your orange squash and Heinz sandwich spread, your cocktail-stick cockles drenched in vinegar and black pepper from the fish van outside The Bell & Jorrocks on a Friday, your scampi & chips in a basket or your cake-mix spoon licks. These are foods that remind me of childhood among many others. But if I eat them now, do they take me back? Nostalgia ain’t quite what it used to be.

The chances are, your tastebuds, like mine, have changed. Our palettes have moved on, become more sophisticated. Some of that is with age, some with the changes in the way we eat and the selection of foods we can choose from now so freely. Sure, I still enjoy a school-dinner pud and the homecooked foods of my childhood years, they’re comforting.

Scent-sationally stepping back in time

A couple of years ago I went to an exhibition about the history of perfume at Somerset House, covering perfumes through the ages, aftershaves and fashions in fragrance. As well as being a wonderfully nostalgic trip into my scents from the nineties – Anais Anais, Obsession and CK One – there was also an interactive installation that invited viewers to just smell, eyes closed, quiet, just smell. A scented treasure trail of plain white boxes with holes on the side to guess which famous perfume was in each.

Unsurprisingly, I didn’t immediately know what all the fragrances were without their decadent packaging and oh-so-cool names, but overwhelmingly, some of these scents were familiar. One box was thick tobacco and old leather. I was whisked back in time to being a four-year-old and imagined my grandad holding his Superman mug of tea and wearing his petrol blue Aran cardigan, the one with the leather patches on the elbows.

Another had an indescribable smell, not identifiable as an aftershave. It wasn’t floral or botanical, not musty or woody. As I inhaled its intoxicating scent, I was catapulted back to one specific fleeting moment in time, my nose nestled against a warm collarbone, weary-eyes and crumpled sheets.

What has perfume got to do with food?

Making sense of our associations with food 

Cooking and eating are some of the few activities that engage all of our senses at once. But the smell, in particular, is potent. My perfume time travels made me think about how smells can send us off to another place, another time, with a subtle reminder or with a full-on flashback to that very moment.

The smell of cooking croissants takes me back to my first flat living above a bakery and coffee shop, where we’d wake up on six out of seven mornings to the wonderful warm smell of patisserie.

How many times have you smelled frying fish on a summer breeze and you’ve been reminded of a holiday by the sea, sitting on a terazza?

The aromas of cinnamon, fruit and spices, and it’s immediately Christmas.

Toasted spiced nuts and I’m thinking of the market in La Cala and the old man cooking them on an oil-drum roaster.

The fatty pungency of jamón mixed with fried garlic and cigarette smoke, and I’m wandering around a coral side street in Salamanca as the sun starts to fall. That could be any street in Spain!

It could be fried onions or candy floss and you think of a fun fair.

That unmistakable smell of popcorn can only be the cinema.

Fresh sweet, greasy doughnuts are Hastings’ seaside.

I think what I’m trying to say is that although all our interactions with food can affect all of our senses, the touch, taste, sight and sound of food keep the experience very much in the moment for me. The smell of food on the other hand, or indeed the smell of anything, even when out of context, has an incredible power of association that transcends time and place, and can throw you right back to a memory even if it was years ago.

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Thanks for reading, I know this is a little depart from my usual posts on here and it’s my first post in the #Write52 challenge. One post each week, for a whole year. Wish me luck.