Whether or not you've read anything by that Proust fellow, you're aware, no doubt, of the idea that Madeleines have a special place in the way we think about food.
This is a bit like saying that the Great War brought about, you know, a few changes in European life.
All the same, it may be worth dwelling on the question of how food induces us to remember moments from the past, whether voluntarily or involuntarily.
It wasn't just Proust who was thinking about this around the turn of the century. The slightly elder Huysmans pondered, in fictional terms, the possibility of synthesizing experience altogether. His protagonist, des Esseintes, lives amongst a battery of perfumes and dyes, forging experience from bottles, pill-boxes, and alembics. Imagine Hemingway with his cabinet of empty bottles, but without the war.
Taste, smell, and the disorder of the senses: herein lies the true fabric of our experience. Do you buy it? This is all fine in theory, as well as in the literary practice of the late 19th century. But how does it work in terms of our own contemporary reality? Does food really invoke memory with the sharpness and clarity we often wish to ascribe to it?
I know my friend Emily Z. would have something to say about this, and I hope that she will. As for me, I admit upon reflection that I've been overtaken by a nagging suspicion: to what extent are many of our food memories discursive rather than sensory? If I harbor strong feelings for my uncle's jellied beef tongue, or for my mother's savory cheese pies, is this on account of the food itself? Or does it have to do instead with the exchange of ideas and excitement that surrounds them? I'm beginning to think that it has as much to do with the talk, as with the taste. Sacrilege?
But I ask you: when someone passes down a recipe, do we recall the taste of the dish, or the bounty of knowledge the recipe supplies?
I'm thinking of the time I learned to make blue (sorry: bleu) cheese dressing at Tonya's Restaurant. It was a filthy experience, yet no less gripping for its powerful inspiration of revulsion. I can't quite recall the exact scale of the operation, but it was huge: let's say we mixed the dressing in a 20 gallon bucket. It was white and monstrous-- the bucket, that is-- with gradations embossed on the side. Into this bucket we emptied a 5-pound bag of crumbled blue (sorry: bleu) cheese, followed by a 2-gallon jug of mayonnaise, a 2- gallon jug of sour cream, and-- now things grow slightly more vague-- perhaps a gallon jug of white vinegar. Then we stirred the whole thing. Slopping it all around until it all the pockets of blue (sorry: bleu) cheese were more or less evenly distributed.
There's something very powerful about this memory. More than just the sense of disgust with which I remember the sound of the mixture turning over as I mixed it, lugubrious and unguent, I recall the novelty of the recipe's absurdist scale. I did taste the dressing at one point, and it was piquant and vinegary, in spite of its obscene fat content. But more than anything I remember the sense of initiation with which I undertook the whole operation. This may have been a standard blue (sorry: bleu) cheese dressing, yet making it in a restaurant meant that you made it in bulk rather than purchasing it ready-made. This saved money, I guess. Most of all, the enormous scale of the venture was its most impressive element: one week's worth of dressing was more than a single person could, I presume, humanly tolerate in a lifetime of weeks.
This sense of scale, perhaps more than anything else, is what impresses me about Stanley Kubrick's film of The Shining. The immensity of the kitchen in the Overlook Hotel, as well as of the corresponding exhaustion of forging a simple meal for three from its enormity, is overwhelming. Here lies the true sublimity of the film: how do you find a way to cook for three people (one of whom is utterly, murderously, bat-shit crazy) from 100-pound blocks of frozen ground beef?
This isn't the stuff of memory. This is the stuff of nightmare.
To what extent does eating enter the nightmare? Do we ever really remember food?
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2 comments:
First, an orthographic suggestion from the editorial dept: "bloo."
Second, wow just wow. Can't keep up. Am still pondering my last meal from last week! More on that later. It involves a great many creatures of the sea.
To make the question of food memory even more perplexing though is the notion that our sensory organs are constantly changing too, right? I mean, "acquired tastes" aside, I don't think I have the same tongue for, say, Butterscotch Krimpets now as I did when I was four...
Funny, I was just talking to my students about this yesterday. I had assigned two completely different texts -- (1), a chapter on the history of globalization that talked about how commodoties such as sugar, coffee, and spices began as exotic luxuries in the 16th century but gradually became everyday necessities, and (2) a short story by a Ugandan writer (Doreen Baingana)about a a young girl growing up in Entebbe in the 1970s. In one paragraph of the story, the young girl describes reading English romance novels, where the tall, dark hero and heroine are always drinking tea or sailing on tea ships to China or doing something exotic. What struck me suddenly in the middle of class (and I hadn't planned to talk about this particular paragraph until a student said something about it) was precisely what you are talking about -- how discursive our relationship to food often is.
And of course, I only began to cook Japanese food after I left Japan. I never cooked it while I was there, and I did so not because Japanese food is excellent cuisine or because of anything having to do with taste, because all Japanese food basically has one flavor -- salty. Mostly I just wanted to keep my emotional relationship with the country (and a Japanese woman that I was still dating) alive.
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