I tried to say “with or without” in the title, but it didn’t fit. Ah well.
I was just watching The Homestar Runner Halloween Potion-ma-jig: A Make-Your-Own-Decision-Venture. I was watching the first part starring Strong Bad dressed as Jambi, Strong Mad dressed as Gossamer, and The Cheat dressed as Toad. Without any warning, I recalled just how OJ’sBreakfast cereal tasted. (All the Vitamin C of A 4-Oz. Glass of Orange Juice!)
Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone has suddenly recalled a particular taste or smell from their past, and if anyone has any theories as to why.
[/Strong Bad]
But really, the above link goes to a GQ thread, but I don’t want factual answers, I want WAGs, memories, partial answers, and people’s memories of this happening to them.
Now that I think about it, the fact is that the characters I described also apeared on my TV screen when Ojs where still around. Thus, it could have been due to nostalgia.
Salsa. I can be eating something completely unrelated to salsa, or doing something completely unrelated to salsa, and my tastebuds report salsa to my brain.
With me it’s McDonald’s pizza which sadly no longer exists. I loved it. Best, greatest, most wonderful. I still count it among my favourite foods despite the fact that it’s been gone for a long time. I really hate when it happens, too, because it reminds me of the fact that I can never ever have it again.
Seemingly out of nowhere, I often recall the taste of these old microwave “pizza burgers” some company such as President’s Choice used to put out when I was a child. My father made sure to get me just one every week when they went grocery shopping - no sooner was it taken out of the grocery bag than I had it in my clammy little hands to put in the microwave. I lived for those damn things. They were a strange concoction of cheese, tomato sauce, some unidentifiable pizza-type vegetables, possibly some kind of meat, somehow breaded and stuck in a kaiser bun.
Sadly, (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it… my gallstone suggests the latter) they stopped making these things.
I can still taste them. It didn’t quite taste like pizza. But it was so good.
Now I have to hunt them (or a reasonable facsimile) down.
I’m not going to bother getting any cites (because I’m just a lazy old broad) but the sense of smell and taste are the ones most likely to evoke a memory in our minds.
Visual memories will only bring up the visual, whereas recognising a smell or a taste will probably reveal a complete picture (visual. audio and olfactory) that accompanied your experience with that smell or taste in your deep, dark childhood. In other words, re-experiencing a particular smell that you got in your childhood can bring back a whole MOVIE of the events surrounding it.
I don’t get olfactory nostalgia often, but when I do it tends to be places, not foods. For example, I moved to Montana from southeast Missouri (well, not directly) and the smells associated with the outdoors are all different: Up here, there is no scent of green vegetation or wet black mud or very many kinds of insect life. One day, completely out of the blue and after I had been living here for a few years, all of the smells of ‘outdoors in Missouri’ came back to me. I could smell the trees and mud and I could almost see the dense forest and hear the junebugs tuning up for another long, warm evening.
P.S. I searched for the recipes mentioned here. Sorry, I found some interesting stuff at http://www.topsecretrecipes.com/ , and some memories, but I could not find the recipe itself.
Funny you should mention it. This happened to me today and I thought, “Hey, I should start a thread on that.”
In the middle of my work day, for no apparent reason, I had the sudden smell and clear memory of a deli sandwich I used to have for lunch twenty years ago.
But really, the above link goes to a GQ thread, but I don’t want factual answers, I want WAGs, memories, partial answers, and people’s memories of this happening to them.