I am going to place this in the description but I will be posting on Monday through Friday, I want to start doing some collaborations with other food writer at my school and I will hopefully be able to feature other articles on the weekends. My Food Memory: Forward: We had a class assignment in Gastronomy to write a paper based on a food memory. We had to pick something that we remembered and why. Here is my submission. I can smell it from the driveway. After I step out of the car into the hot and muggy evenings that only Floridian’s can understand, and begin walking towards my front door, the gentle smell of browning sugar and sulfur wafts past my nostrils. I know exactly what we are having for dinner tonight. My mouth begins to salivate and I feel a shiver run through my body. The aroma at the door is beautiful, it has become more intense and now other smells are starting to invade my senses. When the door swings open I am blasted by the smell of roasting pork. The cold conditioned air with a mix of several distinct aromas is comforting. I walk past the entry hall into the kitchen and I see my mother leaning over the stove meticulously caring for tonights dinner. Caramelized Onions, my delicacy, my drug of choice, my food memory. As a kid I despised onions, I refused to eat anything that they touched. I couldn’t eat sauces that had onions and I struggled to eat sandwiches garnished with this vile food. It took some time but I eventually warmed up to them. Now they are one of my favorite foods. My family always had a ritual, the classic sunday meal prepared by all hands. We would start around 4 Oclock in the afternoon, preparing our dinner for 8ish. We always began with the onions, sliced into thin slivers so that we could cook them for a long time. We always started with about ten onions but by the time we were done, we had a reduced pile of mush that resembled maybe one to two onions at best. While we are taught that caramelizing should be done on high heat, we always slow cooked them. A four hour process that always filled the house with an amazing aroma. Our recipe was simple, some oil to coat the bottom of the pan, heated until it just began to smoke, followed by the addition of the onions, some salt, pepper and occasionally some apple cider. The sweetness of a good caramelized onion is something any person can appreciate. Taking a robust and pungent food and turning into a brown, gooey, topping is something that I feel everyone should experience. This memory is multi-faceted, the smell of slow cooking onions and roasted pork, followed by the feeling of anticipation and excitement. This would transform and evolve into a hungering and lust that can’t accurately be described. Sitting down at the table to our family meal, steaming vegetables, the roast and the onions would always make everyone happy. Culinary Fundamentals brought me home the day we made French Onion soup, as the kitchen began to fill with that all to familiar aroma I was transported back to my home on a sunday evening. Why does anything stay ingrained in our mind? Trauma, fear, happiness, excitement? I don’t know why this food has such an affect on me. I enjoy all sorts of tastes and I have been refining my palate for my entire life, yet something so simple is so devine. If I had to pick why this food memory is so important, I would identify the taste combined with the aroma and the sense of family as the reason why it is so important. I enter the kitchen and walk backwards down the hall, I step outside the front door back to the porch, the smell is strong, I walk back to the car and step in, I can just begin to smell the onions cooking. The gentle smell is just being to caress my nose. Dinner tonight is a classic, Caramelized Onions, my delicacy, my drug of choice, my food memory.
Posted on: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 17:19:15 +0000
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