Writing Prompt Monday: Food
Did you ever come home from school as a kid, to a house that was warm and smelled like chocolate and vanilla? Did you ever experience the comfort and exhilaration of realizing that your mom (or dad or nanny or housekeeper or whoever did the cooking in your house) was making cookies, the way book characters make magic?
Or maybe you remember staying home sick, and how someone made you chicken noodle soup, with those really skinny little noodles and chunks of dehydrated carrot and little green specks that were probably herbs once.
Sometimes just the smell of a dish is enough to evoke a powerful memory. Turkey, for example, is a highly evocative smell for me. Now, turkey always smells good-- oven roasted with apples and herbs, or butter-basted, or deep fried, turkey is delicious. But the particular juicy, smoky smell of a barbecued turkey... that, for me, is a smell that not only makes my mouth water, but takes me back in time.
That's the way my Poppa, my mom's dad, makes his turkey every Thanksgiving and Christmas. It takes days of planning and work to achieve this masterpiece: slow roasted over coals on his barbecue, sending out wafts of tantalizing, turkey-scented steam. When I was growing up, this was the Forbidden Fruit. We were raised vegetarian, but two days a year (Thanksgiving and Christmas), we were allowed to eat turkey. Aside from the odd piece of Canadian bacon I would sneak off Poppa's slice of Hawaiian pizza every once in a while, this was the only meat I ate as a kid. And it was glorious. Juicy, succulent, salty pink turkey meat, flavored like smoke and the triumph of being a carnivore.
Things are different now, obviously-- I am now an enthusiastic and voracious carnivore every day of the year, and I've come to appreciate other dishes at the holiday table besides just the turkey and rolls (yes, Mom, even brussel sprouts). But the taste of that smoky turkey still transports me back to a time when meat was a revelation, a miracle akin to seeing another dimension. To a time when my family was a little younger, when the world was a little bigger, when I was a little less jaded.
See, writing about food, unless you're writing the world's most straightforward cook book, is never just writing about food. Writing about food you remember invariably becomes linked and woven with the people who cooked for you, the people you cooked for, the people you ate with, or the people you missed when you ate without them. Cooking, and eating, are social endeavors. Food is a family affair. When you write about a dinner you remember as a child, you end up revealing more than you'd probably expect about your family, yourself, and your history.
Or maybe you remember staying home sick, and how someone made you chicken noodle soup, with those really skinny little noodles and chunks of dehydrated carrot and little green specks that were probably herbs once.
Sometimes just the smell of a dish is enough to evoke a powerful memory. Turkey, for example, is a highly evocative smell for me. Now, turkey always smells good-- oven roasted with apples and herbs, or butter-basted, or deep fried, turkey is delicious. But the particular juicy, smoky smell of a barbecued turkey... that, for me, is a smell that not only makes my mouth water, but takes me back in time.
That's the way my Poppa, my mom's dad, makes his turkey every Thanksgiving and Christmas. It takes days of planning and work to achieve this masterpiece: slow roasted over coals on his barbecue, sending out wafts of tantalizing, turkey-scented steam. When I was growing up, this was the Forbidden Fruit. We were raised vegetarian, but two days a year (Thanksgiving and Christmas), we were allowed to eat turkey. Aside from the odd piece of Canadian bacon I would sneak off Poppa's slice of Hawaiian pizza every once in a while, this was the only meat I ate as a kid. And it was glorious. Juicy, succulent, salty pink turkey meat, flavored like smoke and the triumph of being a carnivore.
Things are different now, obviously-- I am now an enthusiastic and voracious carnivore every day of the year, and I've come to appreciate other dishes at the holiday table besides just the turkey and rolls (yes, Mom, even brussel sprouts). But the taste of that smoky turkey still transports me back to a time when meat was a revelation, a miracle akin to seeing another dimension. To a time when my family was a little younger, when the world was a little bigger, when I was a little less jaded.
 |
| Much like Ego in Ratatouille |
Some people even write whole books about it, with pictures and everything:
(It's a really good book. Amazon it.)
So for today's writing prompt, that's exactly what I'm assigning you to do: write about a childhood meal you remember. It doesn't necessarily have to be a fancy holiday dinner, or even an organized sit-down meal. (Honestly, it doesn't even have to be one single dinner-- just bits and pieces you remember, spliced together like they all happened at once. Hey, who's to know?) You might be surprised what you remember. You might be surprised what you learn.
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