Novelist Kathleen Alcott on taste and memory and the meals that mattered
Memory has a funny way of tying us to our old selves, often focusing on the mundanities that were the backdrops of milestones – the certain yellow the walls were painted; the area around the coffee grinder, never quite clean. More than the fundamental events as they played out in real time, it’s these details that carry us back. Taste is often one of these bridges for me, the recollection that helps me to understand who and where I was. Though eating is a cornerstone of our social lives, the physical act of it is one of the few we enjoy among others that has a private feel to it: it’s the moment in our communal lives when we can, for the time it takes to chew and swallow, reflect.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a great deal about these meals in my life: the ones that stand out as having marked time in a significant way, the ones that came on the heels of some holiday or anniversary. Some seem very à propos and some a little irreverent – you ate that then? – but all fed me in a way I needed them to, whether I realised it or not at the time. I’ve revisited these dishes – some which I cooked, some which were cooked for me – and tried to pin down their specifics. What follows is something half photo album, half anecdote, the first because of how personal these recipes are to me, the second because they are as flexible as the stories we tell, again and again, which change for audience and circumstance.
Did my boyfriend not think me capable of cooking for a hundred people on one of the hardest days of my life?
A spoonful felt like a drama in three acts: the welcome of the smell, the jolt of chilli, the tenderness of fruit
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