Taste Memories and Imagined Recipes

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Hello to My Honeys,

There’s an essay in Food is a Feeling called “Segments” about feeding Cosmo an orange when he was a little over a year old. To write it, I needed to mine a treasured memory about motherhood and attachment that I’d revisited many times in the 15-ish years since it took place. Because its grooves were well-worn, I figured it would be an easy one to write.

Before I had even roughed out a first draft, I got cold feet. Writing about my experience felt like a corruption, as though putting words to it would forever undermine the clarity of the memory. Adding pacing and narrative structure felt additive, mangling my pure, unadulterated recollection of events that day. A very sweet moment between me and my child was getting slapped around in reality, and if I kept writing and cutting and editing, I feared I’d lose access to the original version, just as I’d lost access to toddler Cosmo in the years that had gone by.

So, I did what I always do when I’m stuck: I talked to my therapist about it (yes, I’m a cliché). Since I’m not licensed, I’ll paraphrase. He (yes, my therapist is a he) said that as soon as we move past the “now” of reality, our mind (consciousness?) starts putting a narrative onto whatever has transpired, which is how our brains make sense of our experiences (??). That meant that what I thought of as this sparkly memory was actually a story I’d been telling myself since the second it happened. Memory shmemory! It’s already all made up!

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This interpretation of how our minds work was quite helpful to me as I went on to bastardize and reorganize various chapters of my life to write the rest of Food is a Feeling. Memoir is cool that way! Unlike, say, biography, which sounds like a real pain in the ass.

When I was was writing about the five year anniversary of That Sounds So Good the other day, I came across a recipe that embodies this same twisted memory mind fuck. Warm Barley with Berries—a sleeper if there ever was one (has ANYONE made this recipe?)—was inspired by something I ate when I was seven or eight years old.

The details are fuzzy because I was a kid, but I distinctly remember going on a car ride with my dad, Frank, to visit friends of his upstate somewhere. They had a kid, maybe two, and my mental image of their house is a cute cottage in the woods. Let’s say it was fall. At some point during the visit, we all went on a hike, and then I asked if someone could take me back to the house. Maybe I had to pee? We don’t know. ...