What’s your fondest food memory? You can revive your tastebuds with ‘experiential eating’
THERE IS a simple question you can ask of everyone’s experience of food.
Ask them this: what is the most profound childhood memory you have of food and eating?
I did it recently when speaking to a group in west Limerick. I was there to talk about what we call “experiential eating”.
And what might that be?
Well, the best way to explain it is to say that when driving north, I stopped at Dromcollogher, a little town with a big square which luckily has not one, but two, local bakeries: Twomey’s and Brudair’s.
I got a loaf of Brudair’s malt and barley bread, and one of Twomey’s thick-cut sliced pans.
I headed on to Newcastle West, where I struck lucky. The two butcher shops in the town square both had heavily salted, white-encrusted bacon in the windows of their shops.
I went into Burke’s Family Butchers (“serving west Limerick for three generations”) where a charming gentleman explained that the bacon was traditionally cured and heavily salted just as it used to be salted and preserved in every farm in the country.
What was once commonplace is now rare as hen’s teeth: it is so difficult to find this style of bacon that “people drive down from Mullingar to buy it from us”, the butcher told me.
So, I bought some, along with home-made sausages and Burke’s own black pudding, and got my instructions: soak the bacon overnight, boil it in water then throw away this first water; start again and cook until tender.
But, before I left, the butcher unhooked a long flitch of salted bacon fat that was hanging up, and sliced off a piece. “This is the best bit,” he said. “We call this ‘white meat’,” he told me, and gave me the piece as a gift.
I felt as if I had been given the keys of Limerick.
So, my little bit of shopping had given me the subtext for my talk. If I am a visitor to west Limerick, I explained to the group, then I want my breakfast toast to be made with Dromcollogher bread. If I am served a bacon sandwich, then please make it with Brudair’s malt and barley bread and slices of Newcastle West salted bacon.
In other words, give me the place, the story, and the people who make this food in this place. (And if you can also give me the story of Mr Brudair marking Christy Ring in the All-Ireland hurling final of 50 years ago, then so much the better.)
It doesn’t have to be fancy: I loved showing the group some bags of Keogh’s crisps, grown and fried in north Co Dublin, which proudly boasts its own SpudNav: the field where the potato came from, the potato variety, and the person who cooked it. (Well done, Peter; the shamrock and sour cream crisps you fried were delicious.)
Give me the experience of the food, and the experience of eating and enjoying the food. Make my eating experiential.
Experiential eating, I think, is extremely important, and important for our wellbeing. It roots us. It transforms eating from an everyday act with anonymous ingredients into a cultural event, even if it involves little more than a bacon sandwich or a bag of crisps.
This is why the question of your childhood food memory is so pivotal. It is the most profound link between you, and eating, and a time and place.
Tina, one of the participants, explained that her memory was fixed to growing up on the family farm, “and getting the morning milk when it was still warm from the cow, to pour over the cornflakes”.
Ciana explained that her memory was simply that of a freshly boiled egg served for breakfast, with all its promise of pleasure, the delight in its completeness.
When I asked the same question a few years back of a group at the West Cork Literary Festival in Bantry, the answers released a torrent of happy, contented answers.
People, it seems, can talk about their earliest food memories for hours.
So, ask yourself the question. And then ask someone else. And treasure that memory of experiential eating.
John McKenna is author of the Bridgestone Guides bridgestoneguides.com
