By Jose M. Ripol
Memories are particles of the past. They represent lived moments we have lost on our journey to the present. However, not all memories are created equal. Some we have conjured up, again and again, molding them like pieces of clay with each recollection. Others are like settled dust that, suddenly agitated, forms a thin cloud made temporarily visible by a ray of light. As a multisensory experience, food has a profound power to evoke. This alchemical combination of taste and smell creates flavors that get stored as memories in the hippocampus. However, this brief analysis cannot hope to cover the full scope of neurological complexities associated with the formation and preservation of memory. Rather, it will focus on examining themes of xenitia discussed in David Sutton’s “Sensory Memory and the Construction of Worlds”, as well as the Proustian role of food in keeping memories alive. In so doing, I will take some license and draw from my personal collection, exploring my recent loss while analyzing the mourning and digestive processes involved in how we cope.
Like the tap of a conductor’s baton announces the beginning of an orchestral movement, the pilot ignition clicks three times before flames emerge from the kitchen range. As it heats up, the oil begins to dance, glistening at the bottom of a caldero that bears the burns and scars of all the meals it has cooked up until this day. I remark on the witchy etymology that gives this traditional pot its name and think of the magic that it will produce in a few hours—a recipe for Asado Negro Caraqueño that I learned from my mother and she from hers. In goes an eye of round seasoned with salt, pepper, and a generous layer of white sugar that begins to caramelize as soon as it comes in contact with the hot metal, darkening both the surface of the meat and the pot, giving the dish the color qualifier stated in its name. In too, go a couple of cinnamon sticks that bloom in the heat before a velvety blanket of blended onions, garlic, green bell peppers, and spices partially covers the now seared pot roast. The braising liquid starts bubbling away at a gentle simmer. The whole kitchen smells like home. It smells like Mom. It smells like me.
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If food is, as Claude Fischler states, instrumental in the formation of both collective and individual identities, then no fare is as important in the definition of the self as the one cooked and eaten at home. It bears the signature of the family home cook; a nuanced mark of distinction that differentiates it, even from iterations of the same dish prepared in similar ways, by similar hands, and in similar homes. I had seen my mother prepare this recipe more times than I can count. It was a staple in her culinary repertoire. A specialty that was always sure to shine as the piece de resistance at dinner parties or more intimate meals shared by the members of the nuclear family. When I flew away to New York ten years ago and left the nest of my home, I thought of my mother’s Asado in a way similar to that of the Greek migrants’ nostalgia for basil and feta as described in Sutton’s piece. It became a symbol of my xenitia, “the experience of absence from one’s home”, as well as the unspoken request for a dish that would await my arrival every visit to Weston; my version of Proust’s Combray. But my craving for asado was overall more frequent than my less recurrent desire to visit home, and thus my mother’s pastellomata — “packages of food sent abroad” — came in the form of oral tradition and family secrets of the gastronomical kind (Sutton).
To recreate a sense of home for my friend Chris, an ex-roommate who had moved to Fontainebleau, France in pursuit of graduate studies, I organized a dinner party with a menu inspired entirely by my mother’s kitchen: a cream of butternut squash and spinach for starters, Asado Negro accompanied by white rice and sweet plantain slices for the main, and a pineapple “mousse” sweetened with condensed milk. I had, as already mentioned, watched her prepare an Asado many times before, but this was the first time I would attempt the task without her watchful eye supervising me from nearby. Lucky for me at the time, a magic combination of numbers opened a technological portal that enabled me to defy geography and reach her on the other end of a phone receiver. She patiently walked me through each step, training me in the seemingly imprecise science of determining when things are done simply by seeing, smelling, touching, and tasting. The party was a resounding success. Amidst the cacophony of sounds that indicate pleasure and enjoyment around a dinner table, Chris chimed in and noted how much the meal had reminded him of his upbringing in Colombia. That evening, we created new memories that I now associate with my childhood’s favorite food. That was also the last time I made my mother’s Asado before a nocturnal spike in cardiovascular pressure ruptured a vein in her brain in the summer of 2019; the flood of blood washing away her memories and her life.
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Returning to the concept of xenitia and homesickness in Sutton’s work, it is important to bear in mind another aspect involved in its definition. As he cites, “more generally in the modern Greek context, xenitia is described as a condition of estrangement, absence, death or of loss…it provokes a longing for home that is seen as a physical and spiritual pain." No other loss is as final and immutable as the loss of life. Death, although certain for all living beings, is a subject matter that most people find hard to discuss and an even harder experience with which to cope. Adjusting to a new reality characterized by the absence of a loved one is a slow process that is often experienced differently by people engaged in it. In a sense, mourning is not altogether dissimilar from digesting. The transitive verb digest is defined by the Oxford Dictionary of English as the process of breaking down “food in the alimentary canal into substances that can be absorbed and used by the body.” It is not a linguistic coincidence that another application of the term refers to “understanding or assimilating (information) by a period of reflection.” Emotionally processing the loss of a loved one requires, among other things, deep periods of reflection. In other words, it has to be digested.
Food, or perhaps more specifically, the social bonding that comes with breaking bread around a table, is often central to the process of mourning. Such is the case for members of an international organization called The Dinner Party. This web of communities around the globe has created a space for people dealing with loss, allowing them to gather around a table and proverbially eat their feelings. It is a space designated for collective digestion; a nourishing congregation based on shared understanding and support.
For many food-centric cultures around the world, death and the numerous rituals associated with it have several gastronomical expressions. During funerary rites, it is common for members of the Muscogee Creek tribe to enclose food and personal items of the deceased in the casket so that they can have them on the journey to the beyond. Similarly, as part of the Mexican Día de Los Muertos rituals, families purchase ornamental skulls and caskets made of sugar with which to adorn home altars erected in remembrance of family members who have passed. In her book, Dying to Eat, Professor Candi K. Cann notes that “food is the stuff that life is made of—in fact, the stuff that keeps us living—and an examination of the relationship between food and death allows us to look at the ways in which the living imagine, remember, and relate to the dead.” However, while these examples serve to illustrate how food is used to remember, they fail to capture the power that food has to evoke specific memories.
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Perhaps the most common example of the strong links connecting food and memory is offered by Marcel Proust in the form of the long passage about the madeleine included in his novel, Swann’s Way. Though initially elusive and seemingly disconnected from any concrete episode, the recollection of an early Sunday morning with his aunt Leonie starts taking clear shape in the author’s mind after repeatedly seeking to identify the sensation triggered in his body by the combination of hot tea and crumbs of cake. Once the process of recognition is concluded, Proust describes how the tea-soaked crumb of the madeleine can evoke powerful images, not just of that morning with his aunt, but of “the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.”
I return to the caldero in my Brooklyn kitchen where I endeavor to recreate the past as though by sorcery. Where the eye of round has become exquisitely tender after a slow braising period and it has had time to cool enough to be cut into precise slices that are, in my mother’s words, not too thick and not too thin. I add the pieces of tender beef back into the pot so they can swim in a braising liquid that has been transfigured into a dark and silky sauce, cloaking the meat in a shimmering glaze. After I assemble a plate in the likeness of my most treasured memories childhood memories, I lift a fork to my mouth and, like Proust, marvel in the explosion of flavors that overtake and transport me back to a time when my mother still lived. I immediately fight the urge to give her a call and share the news that I think I have finally nailed the recipe that once belonged to her mother, then to her, and now to me.
There is a well-known Spanish proverb (recordar es vivir) which in English means “to remember is to live.” Having done some, though not all, emotional digestion—I would suggest an addition to the phrase: to eat is to remember and to remember is to live.
Jose is a Venezuelan American advertising creative, writer, and NYU Food Studies scholar based out of Brooklyn, New York. His interests lie at the intersection of culture, history and identity. When he’s not writing, he spends time in his home kitchen, cooking for friends and family. You can follow him on Instagram at @ripall.
Works Cited
[1] Sutton, David E. 2001. Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. Oxford, UK: Berg Publishers.
[2] Fischler, Claude. “Food, self and identity.” Social Science Information (SAGE, London, Newbury Park, Beverly Hills, and New Delhi), 1998, pp. 275-279
[3] Proust, Marcel. 1928. Swann’s Way. C K. Scott-Moncrieff, and Lewis Galantière.
[4] Cann, Candi K. 2018. Dying to Eat: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death, and The Afterlife. Lexington, KT: University Press of Kentucky.