memory serves

Memory is a fascinating and tricky thing. Oddly enough, in cooking, it really plays an important part, more than you might expect. Years ago I began trying to cook - or recreate - by memory, with mixed results. That's fine by me - I prefer to approach most matters of creativity through intuition and improvisation, and that requires giving yourself over to the unknown and allowing the possibility of failure to happen, something most of us don't want while we are cooking. I also started tapering off in the tasting process of cooking, settling for relying on my sense of smell and limiting my tasting to very small samples. We don't usually realize how closely aligned our sense of smell is with our sense of taste, and while you can quickly become overwhelmed by tasting food, it happens less through smelling it. I have a friend, Judy, who is a professional chef and helped me hone my own cooking skills, who can walk into your house and tell whether you are a good cook by the way it smells. It's really that revealing.

I've met up with a few tricky moments in cooking which emerged from trying to recreate a dish from memory and being betrayed by a particular detail that I'd missed or didn't expect to be important. In most cases it was a favorite meal from my childhood that my mother used to make. Here are two particular instances.

Years ago I was asked to prepare recipes of Mexican dishes to run as a week long special at the restaurant I worked at. Most of these were improvised interpretations of Mexican style dishes. In New England there is scant authenticity in regional Mexican fare available. It is changing, but most natives don't know Mexican food from it's forebears of Spanish cuisine and it's hybrid cousin, Tex-Mex, and for those of us who grew up in areas of the country where authenticate Mexican food abounded it can be hard to find it even in cosmopolitan cities like Boston. But, as I said, it is changing. Thank God, it is changing.

In preparing my menu I had decided that what everyone needed to experience was good, simple, old fashioned Chile Verde, just like my mother used to make. Well sort of. I ran into exactly the sort of problem that arises when one tries to recreate a traditional meal from scratch, only my problem stemmed from calling up my mom and getting her recipe and then replacing her ingredients with upgraded versions. By that I mean fresh ones. The Chile Verde was great but there was something obviously different about it which took me awhile to place. It didn't taste like I remembered it. It finally struck me that the cause of it was because I substituted fresh green chiles for canned. It was a reasonable approach to cooking but it altered the flavor of it and messed with my remembrance of what the dish should taste like. I had mentioned this to a chef friend who is Mexican and from the area I grew up. She had experienced similar problems herself.

The other one came recently. About a month ago I had a craving for fried chicken livers, another dish that was of my mother's favorites. What could be simpler? Chicken livers dredged in flour, washed in egg, coated in flour, seasoned with salt and pepper and then fried in vegetable oil, just like I remembered my mom making them. They tasted different, which perplexed me for some time until I remembered the obvious omission. My mother was born during the depression and grew up in the south. Simple details of small matters affected the way she cooked because she picked them up from her family and community. Things like not wasting food resources such as bacon fat, which she kept stored in a coffee can in the refrigerator and used to cook with. Of course, we are far more advanced these days and we know that bacon fat isn't particularly good for us. Besides, who keeps bacon fat around their house? Well, fortunately, I do, because I picked it up from my mom. So I went and bought some more chicken livers and repeated the process except this time I fried them in bacon fat. Other than using less salt than my mother would have they tasted exceptionally close to what I remember them tasting like.

Of course, this doesn't begin to settle other matters of how we prefer food to taste and whether or not it tends to interfere with our appreciation of it. Some people really have no taste at all, or perhaps it has more to with their memory - memories of comfort, of care and contentment, and of the better things of their childhood.