Memories are made of this

There are few things as wonderfully evocative as food. Good or bad, just one taste of a dish can catapault you back in time, conjuring up the sights and sounds, even the emotions you experienced. A perfectly ripe strawberry, warmed by the sun, leads itself to reminiscing about idyllic late summer afternoons picking your own berries at a local farm. The dry scratch of yet-to-soften Weetabix recalls the sensation of trying to choke down a British hospital breakfast (see Notes from a hospital bed  for a whole blog on this topic) after a tonsilectomy.

I won't try to pretend to be the first person to have made this link; there's a whole genre of food memoirs that
testify to the power food has to transport us through time and space.

In his charming memoir Cooking for Claudine film critic John Baxter links his early attempts seduction techniques in '60s Sydney with the theatrical hiss of steam caused by wine splashed into a hot pan. In Giulia Melucci’s deliciously funny and sometimes poignant book I loved, I lost, I made spaghetti she reminisces about the dishes she used to seduce the men in her life and the comfort food she consoled herself with after her relationships fizzled out. For food writer and television host Nigel Slater, author of Toast: The Story of A Boy's Hunger, the smell of burning toasts conjures up his memories of his mother, who died when he was nine.


I had one of those moments tonight when I made French onion soup, served with the cheese toasts we used to call crostini when we used to have this dish back in the '80s. The sweet silkiness of the onions, buttery broth and the soup-soaked bread took me back to those Sunday evenings when dad would roll up his sleeves and peel and slice onions galore to make a huge pot of this classic soup. The house would fill with the aroma of caramelised onions, fresh thyme, bay leaves, stock and a healthy splash of brandy; the kitchen window would steam up and I would start my not-so-stealthy campaign for more crostini and less soup.

I wasn't actually sure when I decided to make this soup, the recipe for which can be found here, whether I would like it (it has been a very long time between tastes) but it seems that I like both the soup and the memories it evokes.

Oh, and if your only memories of French onion soup are of adding a packet of the powdered variety to a tub of sour cream to make "French onion dip", then it might be time to create new ones...