The Smell of Home is Often the Memory of Dinner Cooking
Why does the sense of smell take us back in time?
Have you ever sniffed the air, and some sudden whiff of scent transports you to another place and quite likely another time?
For me — the smell of chainsaw exhaust, wild cherry pipe tobacco, or the savory scent of wild game cooking, and I’m back in the Alaska of my childhood.
The sense of smell is associated with our earliest memories.
In fact, most odor-related memories relate to the first decade of life and are more potent than those evoked by either sight or sound. The ability of human mothers and infants to identify each other by scent was genetically coded, and so this sense remains preeminent in the first decade of life.
Smells are processed in the brain by the olfactory bulb, and information relayed to the limbic system, including the amygdala and the hippocampus. Since the amygdala is specialized for processing emotion and the hippocampus is essential for memory, it’s not surprising smell affects both of these elements.
Also, odor-evoked memories were associated with stronger feelings of being brought back in time and had been thought of less often than memories evoked by verbal and visual information.
— Smell Your Way Back to Childhood: Autobiographical Odor Memory
This tendency to feel as though I enter a time machine when a whiff of that specific odor is detected intrigues me with its persistence. Of all the memory triggers, even fifty years later, food is the most intense.
Close your eyes. Travel back to when you were a kid.
Do you remember how your friends’ houses smelled different from yours, probably because of what was cooked there?
My best friend’s parents were from Finland and her mom baked with lots of real butter, which imparted a delicious, and to me, exotic scent and flavor to all her food. My mom cooked with what she called Oleo, no smell or taste, as I recall.
Even now, baking with butter reminds me of my friend’s mother. And not just her cooking, but the way she warmly included me in their family vacations when I was a lonely child. All those thoughts are wrapped up in the smell of butter.
Years as an organic vegetable farmer and a need to lower my cholesterol and blood pressure moved me to a plant-based diet.
Yet, I believe wild game can be a healthy part of our diet when appropriately and humanely killed and processed. And, I will say — the smell of roasting venison, elk, or moose, is a familiar and delicious aroma, to me.
Do you know moose meat can taste like willow bark?
There were six kids in my family, and food was expensive, especially when shipped by boat to Alaska in the sixties. Meat in our diets followed a seasonal pattern. Ham for Easter, corned beef on St. Paddy’s Day, and moose meat the rest of the time. Every year my father would plan to kill a moose to provide most of our meat for the year.
Even now, many Alaskans count on harvesting moose and caribou, as well as seafood, to supplement their diet. Don’t worry; there are an estimated 175,000 moose in Alaska, so plenty will be left.
These are the bread and butter species for Alaskans, and more Alaskans are hunting these animals. Alaskans take 91 percent of the roughly 8,000 moose harvested and 97 percent of the roughly 22,000 caribou harvested each year . — Riley Woodford, Alaska Department of Fish & Game
Every wild meat tastes different. I have heard that the unique, slightly pungent tang of moose meat is because of their diet, often consisting of willow and alder bark and branches.
Of wild meat I’ve tasted, elk is my favorite though caribou jerky is a close second. These days, I may be able to enjoy game once or twice a year, but as a child, it was too often for my taste.
My mother’s culinary skills were challenged with moose meat, which is notoriously tough and may be strong tasting. I know my dad was anxious to get the meat, but one year he bagged an older bull, and that fellow was, to put in nicely, gamey. The roasts required diligent chewing, shall we say.
When our regular school lunches were a rotation of peanut butter and high bush cranberry jelly or roast moose meat and mustard on Wonder bread, it was no wonder nobody ever wanted to barter lunches with us.
Moose hunting season has just ended in Alaska.
Each of the successful hunters will harvest 400 to 700 pounds of moose meat. I still have a copy of The Alaskan Camp Cook: Trail & Kitchen-Tested Recipes of Alaska’s Guides (and their wives!) that my mother used.
Since moose roast can tend to be tough, I’ll recommend this recipe using slow simmering. I am getting hungry, remembering the smell of this simmering on a wood cookstove in the winter, I’ve got to say.
Swiss Moose Steak
Prepare two or two and a half pounds moose meat by cutting into chunks about 1 ½ inches thick and 4 inches square. You can utilize less tender cuts this way — pound flour and meat tenderizer into it with the back of knife or chopper.
Brown in meat in a Dutch oven, or brown in a skillet and transfer to a suitable pan. Salt and pepper to taste.
Add in layers of meat, one large onion chopped, two cans tomato sauce, one can mushrooms.
Simmer slowly for one hour or until meat is fork-tender.
This dish keeps well if you want to reheat it just before serving.
Use the Sense of Smell to Comfort and Remember.
Now that we are even more aware of the power of the nose to stimulate memory and emotion, we see how it can be used intentionally.
Of course, that’s why all the pumpkin spiced coffee drinks and candles—to put us in the holiday mood, hopefully.
We can use aromatic foods to both remind us of pleasant times and to create new connections for ourselves, family, and friends. When we take time to cut, chop, saute, and roast—we’re doing more than cooking. We’re creating emotional connection.
In my kitchen, all I have to do is start cooking garlic and onions to make myself feel better. That smell says, Supper’s cooking and somebody cares.
Cook up some tasty memories this week!