A tween girl walked past me the other day smelling like Love’s Baby Soft. That takes me back to early high school.
Turpentine takes me back to my childhood home and the basement entryway. It meant it was summer and my Pop was home from work for the week, painting the house.
Lily of the valley (muguet) is said to evoke pleasant memories of childhood. It does for me, but that’s because my mom always grew it. While gardening it, she would sing to me:
White silver bells upon a slender stalk
Lilies of the valley deck my garden walk.
Oh, don’t you wish that you could hear them ring
That will happen only when the fairies sing.
The recipe is… even more wingy than what’s usual for Spanish recipes.
Ingredients:
lentils (bet you weren’t expecting that!),
potatoes,
chorizo,
other meats (blood sausage, ribs’ ends, chicken wings, rabbit ribs… the idea is that it should be “low end” meats, a concept which of course varies locally),
garlic,
laurel leaves,
carrot,
leeks,
oil (or whatever you’d normally use to fry),
water and salt.
The lentils may be from a can or glass pot, or dry, or from one of those places that sell them semi-cooked. If they’re dry, remember to leave them soaking in the pot in which you will cook them the night before.
Set the lentils to cook in the water in which they came, or in which they soaked, along with the rinsed laurel; prep the rest of the ingredients while the lentils start cooking. Begin on high, then once it starts boiling lower the fire to simmer. Cooking time will vary with the source of lentils: dry lentils will need to cook completely, the other types are already kind’a sort’a cooked so they just need to “get the taste” of everything else. Give larger lentils more time too (about 5 minutes more if precooked, 10 more if dry). If you already have a recipe for lentils, use your usual lentils and your usual time.
Amount of water to use… sorry, depends on the pot and on whether your family likes them on the dry side or with more broth. A pressure cooker will need less water than a regular pot, but it also cannot have water added as you go; on a regular pot start with the water about one finger-width higher than the lentils and add more if needed.
Carrot, leeks: cut it in big chunks if nobody will want to eat them (so it’s easy to set aside), in thin slices if people like it cooked.
Potatoes: cut in chunks or slices. Do not break the end of each cut but cut completely, because if you break them that area will tend to come apart on a long boil.
Garlic: peel a couple of cloves and add them in. You’re not supposed to eat them, they’re for taste.
Add the potatoes and veggies as and when you have them ready, to simmer with the lentils.
Chorizo, other meats: added close to the end. Chorizo and other sausages, cut in smaller or bigger chunks depending on whether it’s dry (smaller chunks) or raw (pieces large enough that they won’t come undone). Give the meats a bit of a fry in not-too-much oil before adding it in (dorar we call it, “making golden”; I think in English it’s “broiling”). Add them and the oil once the lentils are done, then raise the fire a little for a final high boil (just a few seconds on high, stirring to mix well).
Now I’m hungry 
That is so sweet. 
Whoa! I definitely wasn’t expecting such a complex, interesting recipe. Actually, I think I have most of those ingredients on hand right now…
My mother always left the celery in big chunks in her beef stew so that if you didn’t like it, you could easily pull it out. Good thinking, Mama!
Auto exhaust: Hanging around the back of the ice cream truck waiting for my turn to buy a treat. The one in our neighborhood was a Willys truck with a freezer on the back with small doors on the side and back so the guy could reach in and get the product. That meant that on the right side and rear you were right by the exhaust pipe as it idled.
My Mother wore ‘white shoulders’. If I smell it I want to cry, so I avoid it. My eldest sister got all us girls a bottle of it for Christmas a couple of years ago, I have never sprayed it. That reminds me, I am still mad about that! I remember in highschool we all got into incense, to hide those forbidden odors, I giggle every time I smell ‘patchouli’.
The innermost chunk of the human brain is the Rhinencephalon - Wikipedia. The smelling brain. What we call “smell” today is a derivative of how single-celled organisms detected good and bad chemicals in their surroundings. This goes to the very core of what it means to be alive.
Yup.
Once in awhile freshly mowed grass takes me back to recess in elementary school. But it’s a common enough smell that it only triggers when everything else is just right.
I spent one summer in junior high with a badly broken leg mostly cooped up in my bedroom reading. The room had a western exposure and the sun would stream in. Even now, 40+ years later the smell of sun-warmed sand and dust on a 75-80F day brings me right back. I can feel the bedspread, recall the wistful emotional tone of enjoying the reading while wishing I was outside with my pals, and all the rest.
I spent a couple summers in college operating a car hop-up shop. Even now the right combo of old grease, gasoline, and a bit of gear oil takes me right back. Any old service station doesn’t do it; it needs the right mixture.
Agree with the OP: it’s fun to read all these. Thanks for coming up with the idea.
The Christmas I was ten years old, my mother gave me a bottle of perfume called L’Effleur. It was the characteristic smell of Christmas to me for many years, and would be still, if it wasn’t out of production.
Legos, Where’s Waldo, and my American Girl doll. That’s what it smelled like.
When my daughter was born, a friend gave me an assortment of fancy baby stuff from Target. I washed each set of outgrown clothes in that detergent before I packed them away in plastic bins. A few years later I opened them to sort through the stuff for keeping/selling, and the smell of my baby daughter, forgotten for years, totally slayed me.
At times my house (100-years-old) smells like my grandparents’ home (they’ve been gone for 20+ years now). I think it’s a mixture of mildew/old wood/plaster and lathe/damp basement. It sounds like an icky mixture, but I find it incredibly evocative in a very pleasant way.
The smell of old hardware stores. I grew up in a small town that had a traditional, independently-owned hardware shop. Anywhere I detect whiffs of oil, equipment grease, wood/sawdust, and old, oiled hardwood floors I am transported back to my little kid-ness. I also recently found a nearby indy drugstore that smells like the old-fashioned Rexall pharmacy we had.
My father was a truck driver and I went on a lot of hauls with him. The individual or combined scents of diesel fuel, diesel exhaust, brake burning, oil, and leather seats/trim is evocative and reminds me of my dad; same with tire stores. (I actually wish someone would bottle new tire smell. I would become addicted to whiffing it all day).
And railroad ties soaked in creosote and baking in the summer sun takes me back to many a childhood adventure.
Bengay for sore muscles. One of my old boyfriends worked at the post office bulk center loading trucks. When he got off work I used to help him spread it on his back. I hadn’t smelled it for years and one day when I did I was right back in the '70s again.
Ground ivy in the hot sun - smells like my Grandparents backyard. Sometimes I smell it when I walk around the neighborhood and I just want to plant my face in someone’s lawn.
Lilacs - they remind me of May, my sister and I carried them at her wedding in the backyard.
Camphor - smells like my Grandparent’s basement.
The smell of dittos in elementary school. Haven’t smelled it in decades, but I still remember it.
The smell of old books from my grandmother’s house. I still have some of them.
I dislike the smell of cigarette smoke.
But I like to go to a Vietnamese cafe near here, where patrons sit outside to smoke and to drink extremely strong Vietnamese coffee. As I walk through them, the smoke and coffee smell takes me back to France, where every village cafe reeked of cigarettes and cafe noir.
Hoppes #9 will always remind me of my dad on his afternoon off; if I wanted to spend time w/ him I could sit and watch him clean his guns.
The Missus insists on buying these gawdawful scented hand soap dispensers from, you know, that bath and whatever place in the malls. They’re too expensive and, did I mention GAWDAWFUL smelling. Some things you can’t fight. Pick your level of misery battles. Anyway, she bought a couple of scents home that nailed me. The Black Cherry, and thyme, I think, I didn’t get the combo, resulted in me buying a 4-pack of fancy black cherry sodas on a hot summer’s day, taking me back to the cans of Shasta we used to pound down. mmmm…Shasta…. The other was called Japanese Cherry Blossom, and I absolutely swear it took me right back to the gift shops of Expo 67 in Montreal, looking for a trinket for my girlfriend. I said she could get more of those.
Pledge dusting spray and a handiwipe. Saturday morning was house cleaning, somehow I always seemed to get dusting duty.
A certain smell - I believe it was heated milk or maybe heated soy milk - that reminds me of staying at my aunt’s apartment around age 6, many years ago. I think it was part of the breakfast she would make for my cousins before they went off to school. Also a certain laundry detergent or whatnot that I also associate with that apartment. They still live in that same unit all these years afterwards, but that particular evocative home-cozy scent is gone.
I am very anti-tobacco and can’t stand the smell of cigarette smoke. Unfortunately for me, I have a keen sniffer and if someone is smoking a block away, or even if they smoked earlier, I can still smell the remnants that emanate from the hair and clothes.
However, not too long ago, I caught a whiff of cigarette smoke that instantly took me back to when I was a boy, and visiting my Dad during the summers. My Dad was a wonderful man; I worshipped him as a child and he was my best friend as a young adult, until he died (way too young). He smoked for many years, until he quit cold turkey while I was a teen. He always smoked the same brand: Kent Golden Lights. I have to assume that what I smelled was someone smoking that same brand, as I’ve never had any sort of positive memory reaction from cigarette smoke before or since. I was standing there completely overwhelmed at how much I missed my Dad. All due to that cigarette.
I guess I should count myself lucky my Dad smoked what is now an obscure brand and not, say, Marlboros or Camels.
Irish Spring soap. My grandparents used it and their bathroom always smelled of it. Add percolated coffee and toasting English muffins and my memory of their house is complete.
I don’t like to eat roast chestnuts, but the smell reminds me strongly of my childhood- especially of going to the Thanksgiving Parade as a kid.
Time capsule smells:
White Out
Rubber eraser (being used)
Magic Markers
Chalk
Elmer’s Glue
Smell these and be ported back in time to your young school days.
.