An Archive of Taste

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is a journalist and culinary superintendent at sialababamak.pl. Monika likes to bring words, flavours and people together. She helps foreigners learn about Poland from the tastiest side. She also creates culinary spectacles in which she encourages participants to eat leftovers, breathe in the smells of the basement, and sprinkle food with golden dust.

Bread with butter and salt; a slightly burnt crust and soft crumb; the taste of fat and the crunching of salty crystals. The bliss comes when I’m eating while standing up, swaying above the table, spreading crumbs all over my book; my computer; my skirt. I bite huge chunks off, each time feeling softness, crunchiness, and fatness all at once. Whenever you eat bread, you’re at home.

Certain tastes carve out a rut in your mind, creating a permanent association with that one specific flavor or smell; that one and only feeling on your tongue and in your heart. This experience has been recorded in literature as “the madeleine phenomenon.” It’s thanks to these pathways through culinary memories that a person can sometimes weep while eating a meatloaf in a fancy restaurant. A familiar taste comes back, the memory hits like a wave, and presto! You’ve travelled through time to arrive at some far-flung and emotion-laden destination in your past.

Innocuous Disasters, Illusory Brevity

A madeleine (or a petite madeleine) is a smal

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Monika Kucia:

is a journalist and culinary superintendent at sialababamak.pl. Monika likes to bring words, flavours and people together. She helps foreigners learn about Poland from the tastiest side. She also creates culinary spectacles in which she encourages participants to eat leftovers, breathe in the smells of the basement, and sprinkle food with golden dust.

Translation: Jan Dzierzgowski

Publish date: 05.12.2018

Also read:

Jarosław Dumanowski:

A Polish historian. He is interested in, among other things, the history of cuisine, dietetics, and dietary trends. He was born in 1967.

Magdalena Kasprzyk-Chevriaux:

By education a lawyer, by passion a publicist and culinary activist. Specializes in the history of food and gastronomy.

People eat less than they used to—not necessarily in terms of quantity but of diversity, with merely a few plants constituting 80% of our diet. This is unprecedented! Professor Jarosław Dumanowski talks with Magdalena Kasprzyk-Chevriaux about the foods we have forgotten and the importance of our culinary roots.

Jarosław Dumanowski: They say that, every fifty years, mankind loses half of its knowledge about nutrition. Such estimates aren’t, of course strict, but they provide us with some insight into how acute this problem is.

Also read:

Foraging for Forgotten Foods

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