Chapter 12 Food Memories

Abstract

Alight cake summoned up in Proust the most profound meditations on lost time and mortality. He came to believe that ‘When nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste remain for a long time, like souls remembering, waiting, hoping upon the ruins of all the rest’. Food holds memory; it also consoles, stirs emotions, arouses and can often communicate unspoken (and unspeakable) thoughts and acts. Way back in 1954, Alice B. Toklas, the lesbian lover of avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein, released in a cookbook the many flavours of their long life together in France. Replete with pleasure, the recipes are really about sex that couldn’t speak its name so had to be covered in pastry and rich sauces. Elizabeth David’s meticulous and evocative food writing, some think, was her way of dealing with a frenetic and ultimately sad love life.