Prompted by a recent positive review of Japanese writer Asako Yuzuki’s latest novel, Hooked, I found myself, by way of a misunderstood birthday present hint, reading her earlier work, Butter, where one of the central characters, a female maybe serial killer who has a strong interest in food, makes the following observation: “That someone should reach adulthood without tasting a freshly baked cake is a misfortune of irredeemable proportions!” Which is fair enough.
There is a lot of talk these days about some people being more privileged than others and I often feel I belong to the former category, having had the good fortune during my childhood of being regularly confronted with the aroma of baking. In my case it was bread, not cake, that was being taken from the oven on a near daily basis and left on a rack to cool while I, a well-fed, skinny, and always hungry boy, waited for permission to swoop.
Our late mother, like her mother before her, thought nothing of making a loaf of brown bread, or soda bread with currants, which we called currant bread, as part of her daily routine. There was cake at Christmas, and perhaps at other times of the year too, and she also produced apple tarts, but my abiding memory is of bread, the small kitchen pleasantly warm, still filled with the comforting smell of baking, and me cutting those first slices, slathering them with butter, and feasting.
Yuzuki’s novel, in which the gourmand maybe serial killer has the occasional tirade against margarine, has lots of saliva-inducing descriptions of the pleasure to be had from the sensation of biting into good butter freshly placed on rice and other manifestations of warm carbohydrate, though she never mentions potatoes, or brown bread. Perhaps the people who scoff at the standard of food produced in 1960s and 1970s Dublin need to be challenged by revisionist Irish historians.
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We humans communicate in all sorts of ways, including down through the generations. One of the ways in which I responded to becoming a parent was with the urge to cook, including the urge to bake bread. I got a good reaction to my pizza bases, which I made with yeast bread. Both my parents grew up on farms in the midlands at a time when Irish farming families were often near self-sufficient when it came to food.
As a teenager, I was attracted to North American hippy culture, where self-sufficiency was considered supercool. Around the time I was letting my hair grow and channelling my inner Neil Young, my shirt and tie wearing Irish Catholic dad started making his own yoghurt, brewing his own beer (a disaster, but apparently it can be used as shampoo), and cultivating his own yeast. I, meanwhile, got a copy of the Tassajara Bread Book – the book was a hippy staple – and soon the two of us were fighting for space in what had formerly been my mother’s kitchen.
As with the warm aroma of bread fresh from the oven, I still have a strong emotional link with the rich, foamy smell of yeast. The Dutch neurobiologist, Dick Swaab, wrote a great book a few years ago called We Are Our Brains and I guess if you think of our olfactory nerves as part of our brain, it gives you a hint as to why the smells of our childhood and adolescence leave such a lasting trace. They go straight to the core.
But the power of food smells is, of course, a cipher for something else. My maternal grandmother died when I was still a boy, but I have lots of fond memories of her, most of which are associated with food.
These include not just hand-churned butter, and warm unpasteurised milk (yuck), but the kind, seductive sounds she used to make when out tossing feed to the chickens, and the sight of her sitting in the farmyard, plucking feathers from the bird (whose neck she’d just broken) that was to be roasted for us in her always warm stove. She lived to a good age, and died suddenly, in her home, while kneading bread.
When I remember her, I think maybe Swaab’s proposition is misleading, and that to think of us as embodied brains is too limiting. Maybe the Beatles were more on the button when they suggested there are parts of us that don’t die but, rather, limitless and undying, go on and on and on, across the universe.
