Food as memory trigger

I'm not crying; you're crying! (j/k I'm definitely crying)

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Today, write about a specific food that carries a memory for you. Maybe you feel connected to your ethnic identity through food, or, maybe there is a food that you associate with a specific relative or loved one, though maybe there is no specific moment tied to it, or, maybe there is a food you tie to a specific moment but not to a person. Or, maybe it’s complicated far beyond that.

My cousins and I have spent countless hours trying to unravel a dish my late grandmother made, the recipe to which she never wrote down, though it turned out the same every time she made it. The memory I have of it is of eating it at her always comforting and homey house, and later, following her around her warm, yellow kitchen trying to document the recipe though she always claimed you simply throw in a pinch of “whatever you have.”

But, there is also another, newer memory, a far more recent one, long after my grandmother stopped being able to recognize any of us much less maintained the ability to relay the secrets of a recipe, of experimenting with flavors and texting with my cousins that surely I was close to cracking her code. We all were. We’ve all since made very close facsimiles of the dish, but ultimately we are convinced the magic and nearly inimitable impacts of home grown ingredients (and home grown in that particular soil, nourished by sunshine and heat and bayous and regularly drenched by hurricanes) cannot be duplicated. I don’t love resigning myself to that, because I want to believe it can’t possibly be true that I have to live the rest of my life never tasting that dish again, but here we are.

What is it about food that binds so deeply with our heartstrings? Sure, sights and smells do, but food feels like it does extra work in this category of the sensory.

Photo by Alena Ganzhela on Unsplash

Longer writing prompts like these will now be published a few days each week. Everything up to this points is, of course, your full, usual prompt and you’re free and welcome to pause here and use it for just that and write your heart out with it. Or, you can become a paid subscriber (or log-in if you already are) to continue reading the continuation of this essay about how other writers and academics have experienced and unpacked the connection between food and memory. I appreciate you, either way.