Have you ever walked into someone's home and immediately been transported to some other place and time? Food aroma is a great memory trigger. I am a serious family history buff and it occurred to me that recording these memories, events, and recipes might be a unique, and possibly interesting way of capturing the flavor of my family history. As I look back over my life and picture meaningful times, it is amazing how many of those memories are attached to food- tastes, smells, and color.
The other day I was scurrying around my kitchen -- pulling pots from under the counter, removing lids from cans, via my electric can opener, slicing boneless, skinned chicken breasts,; unzipping the precut, pre-washed vegetables; and putting quick cooking rice into my microwave to cook in seven minutes. I took a loaf of bread from my cupboard, untwisted the wire tie and removed three white slices. It struck me then how much I missed the
fragrance and
texture of the homemade bread my mother made when I was a child.
In my mind's eye, I can see my mother bending over the blue Formica tabletop in the kitchen , her hands carefully massaging a mound of bread dough, as it lay in a midst powdery flour dusting. Mom would pick up a handful of dough and throw it down hard with a smack, then punch it and poke it, adding flour until it held a satiny sheen. She would then place the dough in a large silver bowl and cover it with a damp towel, allowing it to suck in air until it was full, round and light. An hour later she would again take it out, massage it, repeating the process before cutting the dough into small mounds, then masterfully molding them into torpedo shapes. She would then plop them into the greased loaf pans to rise once again before baking.
Mom made eight loaves of bread every Saturday, varying between white and wheat, and would treat the family to a tray of cinnamon rolls once a month -- on those days, the air would hang heavy with a warm sweet fragrance..
I loved the taste of hot homemade bread dripping with butter and honey. The honey would seep down into the pores of the bread and would ooze out onto my fingers, which I would lap up with long strokes of my tongue. Later in the week, I would enjoy thick slices of bread with a bowl of Mom's spicy chili - each slice was heavy and worked like a sponge to sop up every drop of delicious juice from the bottom of my bowl. One slice had enough substance to fill my small stomach and leave me feeling content. Modern appliances and conveniences make food preparation quick and easy, but cannot compare to the savory aromas, complex textures, and tantalizing tastes that came from my mother's kitchen.
Mother's kitchen was full of a mixture of aromas and bustling activity from late July through September, when not only baskets of fruit lay waiting, but also the excess produce from our backyard garden. My brothers and I were drafted to work in the hot kitchen peeling apples, pitting cherries, slicing beans, washing bottles or following any orders to help with the assembly line. Mom was fussy about the way the fruit and vegetables were placed in the canning jars and worked with painstaking diligence to create a work of art within the glass vessel. She labored quickly and carefully to generate bottled produce that was as aesthetically appealing as it was delicious.
Steam would rise from the boiling vats as mom carefully lowered the jars until they were immersed in the hot, bubbling liquid. While the jars were timed we continued to wash, peel, slice, dice, pit or prepare our harvest for winter consumption. My brothers and I could only stand to labor for a few hours before we would become anxious to be about our play. Mom, however, would stay and work in her kitchen, often laboring into the night in order to finish the task before spoilage took over. Then, as I drifted off to sleep, I could hear the chorus of popping lids and would awaken in the morning to find glass bottles filled with a kaleidoscope of color covering the kitchen table and sparkling in the sun.
