The absurdities of nostalgia

Nostalgia: what does it taste like – and, more importantly, what does it smell like to you? What flavours and aromas trip you back to childhood faster than Marty McFly in a plutonium-powered DeLorean?

Is it apple pie, still warm from the oven? Roast mutton with gravy made from the pan scratchings? Pikelets with golden syrup? A boil-up? Liver and bacon? Shrimp cocktails at The Jolly Poacher in Pukekohe?

Though The Jolly Poacher was hardly fine dining, when I was a child eating out was a big deal. We’d all get dressed up and everyone would order shrimp cocktails served in tall parfait glass with shredded iceberg lettuce and lashings of salmon-pink ‘‘seafood’’ sauce. Many years later, when I learned that The Jolly Poacher’s gourmet gloop was nothing more than store-bought mayonnaise mixed with Wattie’s tomato sauce, it rather ruined the memory.

Nostalgia is so much more than the sum of its sensory parts. While it’s logical to give credit to your gustatory receptor cells, aka taste buds, their memory-making abilities are fairly mundane. Taste buds are passport control automatons, shepherding everything that crosses their borders into five basic groups – bitter, salty, savoury (umami), sour and sweet – whereas the odour receptors up your nose can spot the molecular differences between thousands of smells. This raw information is then data-matched with emotions in your brain’s amygdala to build your olfactory memory.

In human evolution, the ability to recognise smells is a survival mechanism. When I was up the duff, previously inoffensive smells – fresh asparagus, fried fish, scrambled eggs – made me instantly nauseous. This heightened risk-adverse ‘‘olfactory plasticity’’ is followed at birth by more radical reprogramming, as mother and baby find each other’s scent as appealing as fluffy kittens and marshmallows. Babies seek comfort in more than a mother’s arms; they quite like the smell of her armpits too.

When I smell rotten eggs, for instance, my brain works through a process of elimination: am I in Rotorua, are the kids eating baked beans, is our bantam sitting on a dud clutch or – Danger, Will Robinson! – is toxic hydrogen sulfide gas leaking from the sewer? Or have I just overcooked the broccoli again? Our grandparents were clearly less sensitive to the smell of boiled brassicas and beans, because

that was the way of the day and, in our house, it still is.

I’ve written before of my nostalgic attachment to stringy ‘Scarlet Runner’ beans, cut on an angle (preferably with a retro Spong slicer clamped to the kitchen bench) and boiled until all the chlorophyll has leached from their flesh, rendering them an unappetising shade of army grey. That’s how my grandparents ate them, how my parents ate them, how I eat them and how my boys eat them too.

So it’s understandable that, when I recently returned from the Parnell Farmers’ Market with a basket of burgundy ‘Yard-Long Red Noodle’ beans, my kids were suspicious. The situation did not improve once they were on the plate, either, as ‘Yard-Long Red Noodle’ is the only dark-podded bean to retain its colour once cooked. These strange subtropicals (full name: Vigna unguiculata subsp. sesquipedalis ‘Yard-Long Red Noodle’) were grown by Amanda and Brent Daw of eighty4 Limited.

Finalists in this year’s Outstanding Food Producers Awards, the Daws specialise in growing heirloom tomatoes with old-time flavour in their Waitakere greenhouse.

Yard-long beans (seeds are available from Kings Seeds) are stubbornly coldsensitive; you’re wasting your time sowing them, even in a heated glasshouse, any earlier than November, Amanda says.

Brent and Amanda crewed super yachts – he as captain, she as chef – before returning to New Zealand to make new memories. Daughter Zara is now a budding edible flower entrepreneur, who splits the market profits with her parents, but son Oscar ‘‘only eats tomatoes if he’s in the packing shed and hungry’’.

When my father was a boy, his favourite food was ‘‘whatever we were given’’ because there was never enough of it to go around. But what of today’s children? When my sons are grown up, what will arouse their aged amygdalae? Will they yearn for another helping of crispy oven-baked kale chips, green smoothies or dairyfree chocolate bliss balls?

I suspect my boys will reminisce less-than-fondly about that time their mum forced them to eat those weird burgundy beans, beans as long as their arms, and wouldn’t let them have any chocolate pudding until their plates were clean.

When I smell rotten eggs, for instance, my brain works through a process of elimination: am I in Rotorua, are the kids eating baked beans, is our bantam sitting on a dud clutch or – Danger, Will Robinson! – is toxic hydrogen sulfide gas leaking from the sewer? Or have I just overcooked the broccoli again?