6 - Memory’s Kitchen: In Search of a Taste

Summary

Abstract

This essay tells the story of baking kuchen, a kind of sweet cake. The story tallies with Yuriko Saito's observation that everyday aesthetics is action oriented. The act of family baking is about memories: the right color, the right feeling of the dough and the right scent, which lead one back to personal histories. The aesthetic experience of food of a particular culture at a particular time, and the search for a taste, are also acts of searching for identity. There is a dialectic between memories of a taste and human imagination, evident in everyday baking, where sense memories and emotional adventure are combined.

Keywords: baking, food aesthetics, aesthetic experience, memory, imagination, brain science

Smells are surer than sounds or sights To make your heart-strings crack. —Rudyard Kipling, “Lichtenberg”

Memory it would, in my opinion, be right to call the preservation of sensation … And when the soul that has lost the memory of a sensation resumes that memory within itself and goes over the old ground, we speak of these processes as ‘recollections.’ —Plato, Philebus 34b–c

When my brother and I closed our parents’ house, I saved the recipe boxes that had been tucked into a kitchen cupboard. Once found in just about every American kitchen, these little metal receptacles preserved for generations recipes recorded on index cards. Some of these cards are in my mother's hand, some of my grandmother’s, and a very few in my great-grandmother’s. Many are in unfamiliar handwriting that indicates contributions from friends, and still other recipes are typed or torn from newspapers and magazines. They tell me how to make casseroles and cookies, stews and gelatin molds, soups, cakes, and many dishes that I might read about but never bother to prepare. I remember eating with pleasure some of them: sauerbraten, Christmas cookies, and fudge. Some sound awful: chocolate cake with mayonnaise, quick dinners assembled from frozen vegetables, ground meat, and canned soups.

There was one recipe that I hungered after, but a complete card for that was missing: kuchen. The word harkens back to a time long gone. Kuchen just means cake – any cake. But German has not been spoken in my family for five generations, and to us, the word came to mean just one particular sweet bread and no other.