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The Parisian food blogger and cookbook writer Clotilde Dusoulier listed “Les Sandwiches au Nutella” as one of her top five favourite food memories:
"My favorite breakfast for years on end was a Nutella sandwich. Two square slices of white bread would be toasted, one would be spread with the world's most popular chocolate-hazelnut paste, the crusts would be sliced off and the whole thing cut in two rectangular halves. I loved it and can still feel the thick sensation of velvety chocolate sticking to the roof of your mouth while you chewed on the warm crunchy bread. It wasn't very big really, but I had a small appetite and often couldn't finish it. And instead of throwing it out, I had a habit of taking it back to my (very messy) room "for later". The leftovers were promptly forgotten in the back of a shelf or inside my little desk, quietly getting stale until my mother discovered them days later."
Another writer living in France, the American M.F.K. Fisher, wrote in her food memoir The Gastronomical Me about living in Dijon in the 1920s as a young newlywed; while her husband attended university there, she stayed home every day in their tiny apartment. Her strongest memory from that time, she said, was of buying tangerines, and then sitting alone on cold winter afternoons by herself in the apartment, peeling the tangerines and separating each segment, then putting them on the warm radiator. She described her method, and the sensations it produced:
"In the morning, in the soft sultry chamber, sit in the window peeling tangerines, three or four. Peel them gently; do not bruise them, as you watch soldiers pour past and past the corner and over the canal towards the watched Rhine. Separate each plump little pregnant crescent. If you find the Kiss, the secret section, save it for Al.
...
"Take yesterday's paper... and spread it on top of the radiator....
"After you have put the pieces of tangerine on the paper on the hot radiator, it is best to forget about them. Al comes home, you go to a long noon dinner in the brown dining-room, afterwards maybe you have a little nip of quetsch from the bottle on the armoire. Finally he goes. You are sorry, but -
"On the radiator the sections of tangerines have grown even plumper, hot and full. You carry them to the window, pull it open, and leave them for a few minutes on the packed snow of the sill. They are ready.
"All afternoon you can sit, then, looking down on the corner. Afternoon papers are delivered to the kiosk. Children come home from school just as three lovely whores mince smartly into the pension's chic tearoom. A basketful of Dutch tulips stations itself by the tram-stop, ready to tempt tired clerks at six o'clock. Finally the soldiers stump back from the Rhine. It is dark.
"The sections of the tangerine are gone, and I cannot tell you why they are so magical. Perhaps it is that little shell, thin as one layer of enamel on a Chinese bowl, that crackles so tinily, so ultimately under your teeth. Or the rush of cold pulp just after it. Or the perfume. I cannot tell."
 Like Dusoulier and Fisher, we all have our favourite food memories, specific to a particular place and time, and a particular phase in our lives. One of mine is my grandmother’s pancakes, which she would make on summer weekends when my brother and I would go out to our grandparents’ farm and spend hours every day playing sports in the yard with our cousin, and roaming around the forest and the fields in the area, and trying to catch fish in the creek. We would come in for lunch, sunburnt and worn out, and stuff ourselves on light, fluffy pancakes saturated with maple syrup such massive sugar rushes that we rushed straight outside again and ran around some more.
It’s understandable that we have these fond memories of particular foods. A good meal after a long day’s work or travel eases the strains and stresses of the mind as well as the body; and sharing food with others strengthens the social bonds formed among families, friends, colleagues, and even strangers who have just met. The 18th-century French writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said that food restores and replenishes us not only physically, but also spiritually.
Modern-day chefs, particularly the more experimental restaurateurs like Ferran Adria, Heston Blumenthal, and Grant Achatz, try to create dishes that simultaneously stretch the very concept of food - producing foams, jellies, and other unconventional forms - while forming taste and smell sensations that evoke old-fashioned, nostalgia-inducing settings like the seashore or the countryside. Achatz has said that diners in his restaurant sometimes cry when eating a meal that reminds them of their childhood.
Fisher perhaps stated it best: "It seems to me that our basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.”
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One of the greatest ever novels about time and memory, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (also known as Remembrance of Things Past), begins with the protagonist sitting in bed, eating a “petite madeleine” and drinking a cup of tea that his mother has brought him:
"[M]echanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the same nature."
(I can’t say any cookie or biscuit has ever made me feel that good, but some have come close.)
The American writer, AJ Liebling, on the other hand, lamented an entire epoch of cooking and eating. In his memoir Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris, he writes that, since the discovery of the liver in France, “French life has been built to an increasing extent around that organ, and a niggling caution has replaced the old recklessness.” Liebling’s idol was a small French playwright named Yves Mirande, already in his 80s when Liebling met him in the 1920s, whom Liebling once observed eat a lunch of
“Raw bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few langoustes and a turbot - and, of course, a fine civet made from the marcassin, or young wild boar, that the lover of the leading lady in his current production had sent up from his estate in the Sologne.”
Liebling himself never quite matched Mirande's feats of gastronomic indulgence, but it was not for lack of trying. He had a prodigious appetite, and exercised it daily during his lifetime, most of all during his frequent stays in France. He first arrived there as a carefree student in 1925, and soon found himself pursuing an education - and spending his parents' funds - in Parisian restaurants, instead of in the lecture halls of the Sorbonne.
Liebling died in 1963, at the age of 59, not surprisingly due mainly to over-indulgence. He was severely overweight, so that he had trouble walking, and suffered from chronic gout, as well as heart and kidney problems. But he was no undiscerning glutton. He appreciated quality above all; it was only once he had found that that he gorged himself unashamedly.
He was a shy, soft-spoken man, but led an eventful life - a journalist for The New Yorker, he travelled frequently around the US, Europe, and was stationed in North Africa during the Second World War. He was married four times despite being - let’s be polite, and simply say he was not the most dashing of figures, bald, bespectacled, awkwardly shaped - but James Salter, in his introduction to Between Meals, writes that “women were fond of him,” because “he made them feel intelligent. This was not a tactic, it was genuine.” And it is true that even reading his work makes one feel intelligent, because the breadth of his subject matter and the allusions is so great - Greek tragedy or Shakespeare in one sentence, boxing the next - and the vocabulary is so precise and witty, without ever sounding pedantic or pretentious. His writing was as prodigious as his appetite. (He once said, “No one who writes faster than me can write better; and no one who writes better than me can write faster.”)
Liebling's true appetite was not for food, but for life: a life of simplicity, friendship, curiosity, and productivity. And these are the very things that all memorable meals celebrate.
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