In Swann’s Way, the taste of a madeleine famously transports Proust’s narrator to the realm of childhood reverie. Borrowing a page from the novel, Julian Baggini decided to spend “a day eating only as I had done around the age when I started secondary school,” reproducing the cuisine of Britain in the 1970s and early ’80s:
By dinner time I was losing my appetite for self-experimentation. This time I cooked a 1970s-style spaghetti bolognese, topped with dried ‘Italian cheese’ from a drum. It could, quite rightly, no longer be called Parmesan. Cooking it brought back some memories: the patient waiting for onions to soften, the pink mince browning and breaking up into very small bits and the meaty smell as it did so, the sauce reducing and getting a greasy sheen. But when I actually ate it, it was underwhelming.
Changing habits mean changing perceptions.
Having discovered more interesting dishes, my bolognese is now a bland meat sauce, not a reassuring dose of comfort food. Philosophers and psychologists disagree about whether we should say the taste or the taster has changed, but whatever the answer the whole experience of tasting is certainly very different. When I was a child, I positively liked all of these foods, and now I don’t: if you can’t recapture that pleasure, then you can’t recapture what it felt like to eat them.
It is like standing in someone else’s shoes while still being you. Context frames every experience and so, if your life changes, you can never go back to how it once was. That’s why, as the American wine writer Michael Steinberger puts it in Au Revoir to All That (2009), gourmands eager to revisit great meals will be disappointed: ‘trying to recreate memorable moments at the table is often a recipe for heartache’.
My Proustian day brought back some forgotten memories, but the emotions it stirred in me were mainly negative, a kind of pity for the culinary dreariness of my childhood, as well as a kind of guilt for feeling that I now stand above it, superior and elevated. I was hardly transported back. It strikes me as sad that I cannot look back with straightforward joy at things that made me happy at the time. And there’s something almost humbling about this, a reminder that I was literally made out of that stuff, no matter what I do differently now.
Previous Dish on Proust’s eating habits here.
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