I love cooking for my adult children. They get so excited about food and the idea of recreating a memory through a meal. I sometimes wonder if we can ever recapture the taste that we remember as children. As adults, I think some of our taste memories have been ‘enhanced’ over the years. Just recreating the food doesn’t recreate the memory.
I might be over thinking it, but this has been my personal experience when revisiting my childhood favorite meals as an adult.
My daughter wanted something with pesto in it for dinner. When the kids were young, I knew an Italian woman who had a small farm for a back yard. It was an unusual suburban scene. Every summer I would show up to buy basil from her. I think my daughter’s memories of pesto come from this place.
We would pile several paper grocery bags full of fresh picked sweet basil into the car and drive home with the intoxicating smell surrounding us. I would have several friends over and we would form an assembly line to make and freeze our years worth of pesto. Inevitably the house would be filled with laughter and the sweet smell of basil and garlic.
Tonight, when my daughter opened the container of pesto I’d made and brought along to make pizza with, she closed her eyes and sighed deeply. I could almost feel her being transported in her mind to a summertime supper table of her past where a plate of angel hair pasta with pesto rested just beneath her nose.
I think we all felt young again in the shadows of the setting sun with sweet basil and garlic dancing on our tongues. Even better, the one who still possesses the zeal of youth, danced interpretively, between bites.
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