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 flavour 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
