Photograp
hy^ Xeni
a^ Taliotis62 CalmMoment.com
M
y mum’s standing in the kitchen
and she’s forgotten something.
It’s not her glasses, or where
she’s put the morning’s post.
It’s bigger than that. What my
mum’s forgotten is how to cook.
Of all the things that are being sucked into the
black holes of her dementia, this is the one that makes
me cry the most: providing was such an essential
aspect of her mothering – such an essential aspect
of her being that it would break her heart to know
that she can no longer do it.
It breaks mine too. The realisation that I will never
again taste the food that nurtured me throughout
my life, that was produced in abundance when
I thoughtlessly brought unexpected friends home
for dinner, that appeared in my flat to entice me to
eat after my partner died and, later, when I was
recovering from cancer, chokes me. Still, I swallow
my sadness, take the onion she’s staring at with
bewilderment from her hand, lead her to the sitting
room and go back to the kitchen to prepare a dish
she has cooked for me thousands of times.
Food is as much a chronicler of life as music and
books, and, just like them, it can take us to a different
time and place instantly. The effect even has a name- the Proust Phenomenon, named after the writer
Marcel Proust who, in his book À La Recherche du
Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time), describes how
the taste and smell of a tea-soaked madeleine
teleports the narrator to the past.
You’ve probably experienced your own Proust
moment; I’m willing to bet that there’s a sweet that
carries you back to your child self. For me, it’s bon-
bons. I only have to see them in the supermarket and
I’m eight years old again, in the sweetshop with 20p in
my pocket. I can see the jar being opened; I can smell
the sweetness it releases; I can hear the pink sweets
dropping onto the scales and then being poured into a
paper bag, and I can feel and taste the goo of the
toffee as I sink my teeth into it.
Mostly, my taste memories reunite me with past
happiness and with people who’ve loved me:
Wrigley’s spearmint gum and a Greek pastry called
tahinopita, for instance, bring back my bapou – my
grandfather, as he would always have one or the
other waiting for me when I visited; Cypriot potatoes,
cooked with bay leaves and oregano, will always
remind me of my yiayia, my granny; Christmas lunch
was never the same after my dad stopped being able
to make it. He would get up early to start preparing
everything, and my brother and I would wake up to
the smell of his cooking. No one, not even my sister-
in-law, who is an excellent cook and who watched
him make his speciality dishes after she became
a part of our family, has been able to recreate them.
Sitting lumpen on the other side of my good and
bad food memories seesaw is my first ever school
lunch. I can taste that cold dollop of I-didn’t-know-
what (instant mash, as it turned out) sitting
unswallowable on my tongue, the sodden, aluminium
flavoured peas, and the nausea and snotty tears they
induced when I was made to eat them. This was 19 7 0s
London, 35 years before Jamie Oliver fought to bring
fresh ingredients to school kitchens, and I was a non-
English-speaking five-year-old newly arrived from
Cyprus who had never seen peas in a can or potato
bullets in a packet. I still can’t put either of them in
a food bank and I thank goodness for organisations
such as the Felix Project (thefelixproject.org),
FareShare (fareshare.org.uk) and FoodCycle
(foodcycle.org.uk), which redistribute fresh food
to charities that can help those in need.Though Xenia is now cooking
for her mum, Loulla, rather
than the other way around,
the food they share is still
forming precious memories.