Apple Blossoms Fall Under Endless Sky
Carrot and cashew nuts for a mid-morning snack? Has it come to this?
These days I rarely snack on junk food. Sure, this is betting without the recent run of nasty McDonalds I recently ate, but I had an excuse...I had vouchers. If the burger is free it doesn’t contain any calories, right?
Certain foods have an unusual property. Just as a song can take you back to the place you first heard it, food can catapult you back in time to your childhood when sweets were Good and all drinks were carbonated. These sensory trips to childhood are few and far between because I how differently I now eat; in fact I have changed my habits substantially even over the last couple of months. So it is worth swimming about in this subject for a while...examine a few of the catalysts that would be required for one of these sensory trips.
Hmm...having decided to write about it I realise that this is what Nigel Slater did in his Toast autobiography. This is one of the very few autobiographies I have enjoyed. The hazy, almost woozy sense of a childhood being one long hot summer of apple blossom and wild grass and strange encounters in the wood...few people can genuinely claim to have this memory. But we all have a soft spot for that atmosphere and this book wallows in the stuff.
Nigel writes about his childhood here through the lens of food, taking a particular dish for each chapter and spinning his stories around that theme. It sounds like an irritating conceit but in practice this turns out to be as good as any way of finding one’s way into the psyche. So Toast becomes a wonderful dirty little book full of little pleasures, sexual fumblings and lost vagueness. There is an sense of hunger on every page with many sensory explorations of the food, but what really comes alive is the sense of innocence...at turns charming, sad and naughty.
Indeed...but I am being sidetracked here. Let us force some memories onto the page.
One combination of food that conjures up memories is a glass of Coke and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps. This takes me back to the beer garden of a pub in Lincolnshire...a garden of picnic tables, swings and endless grass. The concept of pub to me at that young age was not the adult one of the charming provider of the Good Juice...it was the imperious building you never went inside that had a place to play outside. We visited the place frequently in the summer at weekends away from Sheffield...but if I ever returned I would discover a place of rotten beer surrounding by a crappy little enclosure full of repulsive screaming lungs on legs.
Sherbert Fountains take me back to playing strange games in the woods; jumping over ditches on a rope swing and swapping tales of abandoned car hulks and secret fields. Hmm...strange how there was always this field somewhere nearby that nobody could find anymore, and if it was found it would be better than discovering Atlantis. But it was only a field. What would we have done had we found it? Would there have been fireworks as we frolicked and gambolled like sheep? More likely we would have stood and picked our noses whilst waiting for someone to invent Playstations. It was the mystery that captivated us more than anything.
What else? Mushy peas remind me of old Christmasses. Back then, the good television seemed to go on forever, as did the snacks and fizzy grape juice, the photo albums and grandmotherly stories, and my father’s political arguments with my great Aunt. She relished a good debate. She never had an agenda, a political point to prove; she did it for fun. I would listen in wonder how she could end a debate putting forward precisely the opposite of the one with which she had started without letting you think you were ever right.
You do have to be careful with this kind of thing. It is a minefield for the lazy nostalgia freak; for every ten people who remember buying sweets by the quarter from proper sweet shops every day, only one person actually ever did this. This is entirely the fault of second-hand nostalgia that bombards us from television. After being told for the tenth time that a particular talking head thought that Battle of the Planets was the best cartoon ever, we begin to believe we saw every episode and even begin to conjure false memories of sitting down every Saturday to watch it. It was the same with Doctor Who – the new series of which is impressive and fun – I nod sagely at every reference to our shared memories of how good the Tom Baker years were, but fuck only knows whether I watched it or not. If I did, I do not remember any of it. The power of suggestion...
Well, I have finished the carrot and cashew nuts now and I am still hungry. To hell with childhood food. All I want now is a nice grown up lunch.
These days I rarely snack on junk food. Sure, this is betting without the recent run of nasty McDonalds I recently ate, but I had an excuse...I had vouchers. If the burger is free it doesn’t contain any calories, right?
Certain foods have an unusual property. Just as a song can take you back to the place you first heard it, food can catapult you back in time to your childhood when sweets were Good and all drinks were carbonated. These sensory trips to childhood are few and far between because I how differently I now eat; in fact I have changed my habits substantially even over the last couple of months. So it is worth swimming about in this subject for a while...examine a few of the catalysts that would be required for one of these sensory trips.
Hmm...having decided to write about it I realise that this is what Nigel Slater did in his Toast autobiography. This is one of the very few autobiographies I have enjoyed. The hazy, almost woozy sense of a childhood being one long hot summer of apple blossom and wild grass and strange encounters in the wood...few people can genuinely claim to have this memory. But we all have a soft spot for that atmosphere and this book wallows in the stuff.
Nigel writes about his childhood here through the lens of food, taking a particular dish for each chapter and spinning his stories around that theme. It sounds like an irritating conceit but in practice this turns out to be as good as any way of finding one’s way into the psyche. So Toast becomes a wonderful dirty little book full of little pleasures, sexual fumblings and lost vagueness. There is an sense of hunger on every page with many sensory explorations of the food, but what really comes alive is the sense of innocence...at turns charming, sad and naughty.
Indeed...but I am being sidetracked here. Let us force some memories onto the page.
One combination of food that conjures up memories is a glass of Coke and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps. This takes me back to the beer garden of a pub in Lincolnshire...a garden of picnic tables, swings and endless grass. The concept of pub to me at that young age was not the adult one of the charming provider of the Good Juice...it was the imperious building you never went inside that had a place to play outside. We visited the place frequently in the summer at weekends away from Sheffield...but if I ever returned I would discover a place of rotten beer surrounding by a crappy little enclosure full of repulsive screaming lungs on legs.
Sherbert Fountains take me back to playing strange games in the woods; jumping over ditches on a rope swing and swapping tales of abandoned car hulks and secret fields. Hmm...strange how there was always this field somewhere nearby that nobody could find anymore, and if it was found it would be better than discovering Atlantis. But it was only a field. What would we have done had we found it? Would there have been fireworks as we frolicked and gambolled like sheep? More likely we would have stood and picked our noses whilst waiting for someone to invent Playstations. It was the mystery that captivated us more than anything.
What else? Mushy peas remind me of old Christmasses. Back then, the good television seemed to go on forever, as did the snacks and fizzy grape juice, the photo albums and grandmotherly stories, and my father’s political arguments with my great Aunt. She relished a good debate. She never had an agenda, a political point to prove; she did it for fun. I would listen in wonder how she could end a debate putting forward precisely the opposite of the one with which she had started without letting you think you were ever right.
You do have to be careful with this kind of thing. It is a minefield for the lazy nostalgia freak; for every ten people who remember buying sweets by the quarter from proper sweet shops every day, only one person actually ever did this. This is entirely the fault of second-hand nostalgia that bombards us from television. After being told for the tenth time that a particular talking head thought that Battle of the Planets was the best cartoon ever, we begin to believe we saw every episode and even begin to conjure false memories of sitting down every Saturday to watch it. It was the same with Doctor Who – the new series of which is impressive and fun – I nod sagely at every reference to our shared memories of how good the Tom Baker years were, but fuck only knows whether I watched it or not. If I did, I do not remember any of it. The power of suggestion...
Well, I have finished the carrot and cashew nuts now and I am still hungry. To hell with childhood food. All I want now is a nice grown up lunch.
posted by Jamie at 4:14 PM
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