Nostalgia-Free Cookies

First of all, there's no such thing.

That, at least, is what everyone told me. "The nose," Coach Taylor explained, "is the organ of nostalgia par excellence." Her paramour, whom I'll call A/V, agreed. "Smell and memory are inextricable," he said.

But herein lay my opening. "Nostalgia and memory are not the same thing. Memory has to do with events that actually happened; nostalgia is fictional sentiment."

Across town, my friends P. and J-M concurred. "Nostalgia refers to something that never took place." But then a slight correction: "Or at least, it refers to something that has become fictionalized, even if it was real to start. You turn it into myth."

I was in Philadelphia for two evenings this week, and I used the occasion to bore my friends with a question that had occurred to me as I was reading about the world financial crisis. The crash, as everyone knows, stems from the surfeit of McMansions. And we've all heard, of course, about the real-estate sales ploy of baking cookies in otherwise soulless houses; the smell of baking was designed to counteract this. Fanned throughout the empty husk of home model A, this smell induced a sense of homeyness that prompted potential home-buyers to ferret out desperate mortgages they could not afford. The smell of cookies drives us homeward; yet in driving madly homeward, we arrive to find little more than fumes.

This may seem more prosaic than any Proustian involuntary memory, but for a spell it was a whole lot more profitable. Until now, of course. No superabundance of cookies can offset global panic.

All the same, it comes back to cookies. If you ask me, the global financial crisis has to do with the unfortunate bond between cookies and nostalgia. (What a sad fate for such an unassuming pastry. First it was heart attacks, and now this. It simply isn't fair!) But since there are fat-free cookies, might it not be possible to develop nostalgia-free cookies as well?

This was the idea.

For Coach T. and A/V, who are marvelously rational people, the proposition would call for a massive shift in cookie composition. The olfactory agents would have to change entirely. What is it we smell when we bake cookies? The caramelization of sugar; the browning of butter; the melting of cocoa butter. These elements— so fundamental to our sense of the familiar— would have to go. Cookies could be made instead from savory ingredients. "Why not meat?" A/V offered. But by this time it was becoming clear that my inquiry had overstayed its welcome: it was, after all, time for dinner. And attention was turning toward meatier things.

For the ever tactful P. and J-M, the question soon shifted into a discussion of nostalgia itself; this spared me the embarassment of conversational overkill. Was nostalgia purely a fiction? Or could it refer to something specific? To put the question another way: do realtors bake cookies in order that the smell remind homebuyers of their actual homes, or only that it remind them of an idea or ideal of home they carry around with them?

I'm no Des Esseintes; but I'm wondering all the same whether the whole emotional register of cookie baking might be pried open entirely. Why limit the exploration of scent to the narrow margin between memory and nostalgia, when the whole range of sentiment can provide a terrain for exploration. Might it be possible to bake cookies whose scent made everyone sad, or eager, or triumphant? What about a batch of brownies that reduced one's guests to speculation, or to uneasiness?

We're straying ever closer to molecular gastronomy here. But this is not simply a matter of synthesizing olfactory effects. If a batch of cookies were to give off the odor of tobacco, or of burning leaves, would this alter their ties to nostalgia? Or would it be simply a different nostalgia? The real question— kidding aside— is whether the activation of our sense of smell is tied simply to memories (whether "real" or imaginary), or whether, like tastes, it's possible to access other forms of cognition, whether conscious or unconscious. Are there smells to which we might react in terms of danger, for instance?

Imagine what "danger cookies" might taste like.

Or perhaps realtors have been baking danger cookies all along, and we simply haven't learned to react to them properly.