Making scents

Some foods need to be eaten in restaurants

When I was a youngster, Saturday night at our house was liver and onions night.

I must not have been very bright, because it always caught me by surprise.

By the time I smelled the liver cooking in the pan – and even to those who don’t like liver, it smells heavenly frying with onions – it was too late.

I’d be trapped.

It was like “Groundhog Day.” It felt like every day I woke up it was Saturday night.

I would rather have taken the obligatory boot in the arse from the old man than suffer another feed of liver and onions.

Instead Ma got to me first and I got the “starving children of the world” discourse, 20 minutes’ worth, and then the liver and onions.

Every bite was child-abuse. I couldn’t put enough ketchup, gravy, or salt on it. I could push it around my plate for an hour or two, but I still had to eat it. I had no dog, cat, pet crow, brother or sister to pawn it off on and my grandmother wouldn’t take her eyes off me for a second.

I couldn’t hide it under a napkin or in my hatband. She didn’t even blink; she held me in a gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun, as the poet once said.

It was torture.

But now?

Now, when I can talk myself out of ordering the club sandwich at a restaurant, I gladly pay upwards of 12 bucks for a feed of liver and onions and I salivate waiting for the waitress to bring it to the table. I can see it in my mind, smell it, almost taste it. Two nice big slices of tender liver, topped with bacon, smothered in onions and gravy, with mashed potatoes, carrots and turnip, and God bless the cook at the restaurant who knows about turnip. The piece de resistance!

When say I’m happy to pay 12 bucks at a restaurant, even though a feed of liver is like $1.98 at the grocery store, I mean I’m happy to pay for the use of their giant exhaust hood.

Because liver and onions, as everyone knows, sticks around long after supper.

There’s something going on with my nose.

While the rest of me is falling subtly into decline, piece by piece, the knees, eyes, ears… my nose seems to be achieving X-Ray vision acuity. I find I’m going around the house saying, “Do you smell that?” “Smell what?”

“That! That… it’s like smoked sauerkraut. You can’t smell it?”

It’s olfactory paranoia. If somebody puts a plate in the dishwasher with egg yolk on it, I smell it in every glass, every teacup.

Is it just me?

I’ve been like this ever since I took 30 dollars’ worth of salmon out of the freezer to get at my hidden ice cream sandwich and forgot to put it back. The next day, there was a little sense of something not right when I entered the basement. Couldn’t put my finger on it.

The next day I looked everywhere for a possible dead mouse. The next day I was tearing the place apart.

And finally found the salmon on top of the freezer.

Now my nose is smelling things. Extra suspicious. Odors cling to it like Velcro. I go to bed, I’m smelling supper. Haunted. Tossing and turning. Liver and onions, pan fried haddock, baloney. Steak, fried, as it must be, on high one minute per side, in butter, paints

the walls with a hum that can only be washed away with time … or worse! ... Scented candles.

No, nowadays I take my deepest fry desires to a nice family restaurant. Preferably endorsed by seniors who know where the consistently good food is.

Let them deal with the afterglow.

What’s 12 bucks for liver and onions and a good night’s sleep?