After my previous post I pondered a bit on the manner in which food can connect, indeed transport us, to our past through the vehicles of taste and smell. There are sensations that will always be intimately linked to my childhood, even if I never experience them again.

Which in the case of cabbage, I most assuredly won’t. I loathe cabbage - even the smell of it, particularly boiled, makes me retch. It also induces in me a furtive and sneaky feeling, as if I’m once again a young boy faced with the task of removing the Devil’s Vegetable from my plate and depositing it in the trash or out the window, without being discovered and forced to consume any of said, evil leaf.

The smell of coffee brings me far, far back, just about as far as my conscious memory extends, give or take a random bit of recollection. I am four or five I think, sitting in the kitchen on Mt. Vernon Street with my maternal grandfather. He is brewing up a pot using a silver coffee percolator. Later that day (or was it the evening before?) I will sit on the sidewalk out front, waiting for Grumps to return from work at the Essex Institute.

Some smells are gone forever from this life, and though unknown to the world at large were inordinately important to some. They were, and are, distinctive yet practically  indescribable. If you could bend the laws of space and time and lead me blindfolded into Nana’s kitchen, I would know in a heartbeat where I was. But I would be hard-pressed to describe that smell to you.  The closest I could come would be to call it an amalgamation of lasagna and pizelles, of the cookies stored in the brown jars, and the coffee served in bowls.