The Taste of Time Travel

Memory, of course, is a sort of time travel.

Every time I make potato salad I engage in time travel. Part of my self is a kid briefly elevated from Mom’s scullery maid to an assistant chef chopping onions and marinating them with apple cider vinegar and celery seed. Potatoes and eggs are chopped. I’m listening to Mom tell stories about her grandma who had specific instructions for peeling very thin curls of skin from potatoes. She gave equal time to recipes from Dad’s side of family, the ownership of the potato salad recipe was attributed to Dad’s mom who passed away two years before I was born. Every story from my home seemed to be about family history. The tang of biting into an onion releasing a bit of vinegar and the savory taste of celery transports me back to a time when a home and family, who are now all gone, made up my here and now. It is more than memory when textures and flavors flood my senses.

I close my eyes and I am back in the kitchen of the farm house in which I grew up. The kitchen table, aluminum legged and vivid yellow formica top has small cut glass bowl of homemade cranberry sauce on it, always. It was Dad’s favorite side dish and end of meal digestive aid. This flash of memory reminds me that Dad was left-handed and the sauce was just to the left of the table setting for Dad.

I remember so many little things about family and gatherings when I taste travel.

The future – visualizations and dreams are time travel too. Memoir is not just about the past. I am still creating the experiences about which I write, or will write. I firmly believe that visualization of different paths I might walk help me make decisions and know the right path when I find it the beginning of it.

Seeing my mother’s handwriting on a recipe card conjures the cinnamon scent of her snicker doodles. Recipe cards are the ignition switches of gustatory time travel. A friend’s handwriting and blueberry stains on a card transport me back to a time when we were setting up our first kitchens and discovering and creating what would become our trademark dishes. Every friend’s kitchen held a cookbook from an upstate New York restaurant that taught us about vegetable pies and killer cheesecake. Oh, the friends and food that surrounded our tables back them.