Fragrant flashbacks

It seems strange that while you may struggle to remember familiar places or the names of old friends, the fragrant whiff of a particular food can arouse vivid memories of amazing clarity. It may be the remembrance of a favourite aunt’s chocolate cake or a comforting vada pav. Alternatively, a book, a blue sky or the sound and smells associated with familiar or forgotten foods may rake up old memories.

Happy food memories are equated with love and a sense of well-being, connected with the old and familiar. These could be triggered more often by the ordinary, everyday foods of early years than grand feasts of epic proportions. Both feasts and abstinence provide a lifetime of shared memories: the gluttonous bingeing of a Christmas or Diwali meal, the austere pleasures of fasting foods during Holy Week, iftar feasts at dusk, all deeply etched in the mind, to be brought up at will.

Wondering if food memories were an extravagance for those who had the luxury of time and self-indulgent ruminations, I decided to ask around. I questioned Seenu, a daily labourer from Andhra Pradesh, about his earliest memories of food; he replied shyly, “my mother’s pulusu ” and then walked away as though having said too much. I imagined his mind was far away in the chilli fields of his childhood home, as images of his mother’s sweet-sour-spicy pulusu teased him with happy memories. Ayyamma, my feisty gardener, was more vocal; the rasa-vadas at a wedding she had attended as a child. She must have been seven or eight, she guessed. She described the bullock-cart ride to the temple, her red pavadai , the fragrant jasmine strands on her tight braids. As each fragment of memory led to the next, she painted a picture of a tiny village in South India, all this evoked by a rasam -soaked vada eaten more than 50 years ago.

Flavours of fiction

Food memory is at its best in fiction. Who hasn’t read Enid Blyton’s books and salivated at the memory of picnics and midnight feasts of tinned sardines, jammy buns and boiled eggs-with-a-screw-of-salt all washed down with ginger beer or lemonade? Or, devoured Laura Ingalls Wilder’s memoirs, when the table was crowded with hickory-cured ham, berry pies and maple sugar candy? Pippi Longstocking’s pancakes prompted me to try her manic approach to cooking. Reading about the adorable William’s passion for bull’s eyes, liquorice sticks, acid-drops and gooseberry eyes in Richmal Crompton’s William series, made me want to taste each one of them. Literary flashbacks are perhaps epitomised best in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past . A bite of a Madeleine arouses memories so powerful that the reader is transported to the setting of evening teas with his aunt Leonie: “And once I had recognised the taste of the crumbs of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime flowers which my aunt used to give me — immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre… and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all the weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine.” And as he continues with the details of Combray, a little village he visited as a child, its little dwellings and the parish church and surroundings take shape for the reader.

Hungry and happy

Mahatma Gandhi, who reportedly had no favourite foods, once said: “Pleasurable feeling comes from satisfaction of real hunger.” Food memories from a time of deprivation may often be the most evocative recollections of a time when life was simpler, food more meaningful — in that, the pleasurable feeling came from, in Gandhi’s words, the satisfaction of real hunger. Perhaps, the memory of foods consumed in times of real hunger has sharper edges and brighter hues, the smells and flavours more aromatic and intense. Does that mean that not having known ‘real hunger’, as Gandhi defines it, deprives you of truly significant memories?

In A Moveable Feast , Hemingway penned his memories of living in Paris in the 1920s, poor, happy and writing in cafes with a cafe crème. But Michaud’s was where he aspired to be. Michaud’s, frequented by the likes of James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Scott Fitzgerald.

Perpetually cold and hungry, being in the right place mattered so much that Hemingway wondered how he could work in a meal at the elusive Michaud’s. A lucky day at the races made it possible and, as they waited for a table outside the restaurant reading the menu, Hemingway wondered aloud how much of what they felt was real hunger. “There are so many sorts of hunger”, his wife said. “In the spring there are more. But that’s gone now. Memory is hunger.” But, looking into the window of Michaud’s and seeing the tournedos being served, he knew he was hungry in a very simple way.

He wrote, “You got hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris… so the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat.” In the museum, he observed, all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if the belly was empty and hollow-hungry. But this, he concluded, was how he remembered Paris in the early days, when they were very poor, very happy and always hungry.

Sound logic

The experience of eating is multi-sensory, but it has been argued that food memories are more likely to crop up from smell rather than taste. The nose picks up what the tongue does not — the smell of ingredients, the dust or damp in the background or smoke from a wood-fire hearth. Sound also adds to these memories; the music associated with a particular food, the words spoken at a meal, pots and pans clunking in the kitchen, even the background noise of traffic, a siren or the call of a muezzin or church bells.

Abraham Verghese, who reviewed my book The Suriani Kitchen , went on a nostalgia trip as he sat down and read the manuscript in one sitting. He wrote, “I was transported back to my grandmothers’ kitchen and I could hear the mustard seeds bursting and smell the delicious curries brewing in the clay pots.”

Writing my own cookbook memoir was an experience that took me to many corners of my own life. As I wrote of fish curries and tapioca cooked over wood-fire hearths and jackfruit cakes steamed in banana leaves, remembrances of people, stories, incidents from the past came rushing up in bursts, each sharpening and forming a new memory as I relived them. Black coffee, sweetened with jaggery and drunk in tea-shop glasses brought a memory of standing on a deep, shady verandah feeling grown-up. Kerala and Bombay monsoon smells, both different, were evoked by different foods; Kerala’s incessant rain was synonymous with hot plantain fritters; Bombay monsoons with buttered-bread-in-sweet-hot-milk. Later, in writing down the recipe for pidi, a sweet rice cake moulded by the hands that shaped it, I would nudge the old memory of an unpleasant incident. There’s no telling what a food memory will bring.

Hearty affair

Noted food writer Julia Child’s own Proustian moment changed her life forever, as recorded in My Life in France . Her first French meal in the Restaurant La Couronne in Rouen was to set the standard by which all future meals were to be created and judged. Importantly, it changed her opinion of France and its “icky-picky people where the women were all dainty, exquisitely coiffed, nasty little creatures, while all the men were Adolphe Menjou-like dandies who twirled their moustaches, pinched girls, and schemed against American rubes.”

The sole meuniere “arrived whole: a large Dover sole that was perfectly browned in a sputtering butter sauce with a sprinkling of chopped parsley on top... I closed my eyes and inhaled the rising perfume. Then I lifted a forkful of fish to my mouth, took a bite, and chewed slowly... It was a morsel of perfection,’ she decided, ‘and a dining experience of a higher order than any I’d ever had before.” It was the remembrance of this perfect meal that inspired her to master the art of French cooking and write about it. And the rest is history, as she went on to become one of the most beloved food writers in recent times.

Sarla Razdan’s cookbook Kashmiri Cuisine Through The Ages begins thus: “Lunch was at 9am. This is my earliest food memory from Kashmir.” And you are immediately hooked, wanting to know more. She went on to tell us about waking up on a snowy winter morning and warming up by a kangri as her mother prepared a simple meal of rice and greens. Soon, I was in a world of gushtabas and yakhnis , and the faraway memory of a school-trip and hot kahwa on a snowy day came drifting in.

In his memoir Pig Tails ‘n’ Breadfruit , Austin Clarke lapses into his mother’s way of speaking while cooking. As he prepares a childhood favourite — oxtails with mushrooms and rice — far away from his beloved Barbados, his mother’s words resonate in his head. “Cut up two big-big onions and put them in the saucepan with the oxtails. Throw in some whole cloves, enough to fill one teaspoon or a li’l more; a li’l salt; and as many hot red peppers as you or your friends could bear... Bring the ingeasements that you just put in the saucepan to a boil. The minute it boil, turn down the heat.”

This is the best kind of food memoir, inviting the reader into a new and foreign kitchen, rolling new food-words in your mouth as you salivate at the thought of strange foods you may never taste; nevertheless you are enjoying that moment when the lid is lifted to reveal a meal “that is going to stick to your ribs and make you feel that you could move the earth. Or make love or dipsy-doodle all night, and next morning too.”

Piece together

On a recent trip to Mauritius, we stopped to eat at a small eatery on the edge of the sugarcane fields in Chamarel. ‘Palais de Barbizon’ served us a platter of Creole food accompanied by cold rum punch. Greens with salt fish, Lima beans with mutton, cassava cooked with dried shrimp, and roasted mashed brinjal with lemon and thyme. And later, bananas simmered in caramel and thick, black coffee. It dredged up images from books read about the hardships of a slave’s life on distant plantations in Austin Clarke’s Barbados and here in Mauritius, perhaps in the sugarcane fields beyond the little restaurant. We were reminded of the indentured labourers who had made that difficult journey to Mauritius, in ships like the Ibis in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies . Diti had stepped off the ship with her lover Kalua and gone on to make a new life, perhaps in sugarcane fields like these.

The cassava and dried shrimp also reminded me of the tapioca/fish/prawn combinations in my native Kerala cuisine: a distant cousin perhaps, which summoned up images of the backwaters and toddy shops along rice fields, and a wedding. I had to shake myself to get out of the moment, and the faint memory of a giggling bride held aloft over a coconut-log bridge. I’ll go there another day, I told myself, to revisit the memory.

( Lathika George is an author based in Kodaikanal)

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