The (Food) Stuff(s) of Memory

I'm sitting here putting off some studying by eating the packet of Smoky Bacon Crisps Katie sent me and listening to the Edinburgh Club Mix Steph made me. When I close my eyes I feel like I'm in a totally different world. So maybe I am licking the inside of the bag -- I miss savory crisps.

It's funny how strongly smell and taste are tied to memory. Katie and others from Edinburgh were kind enough to indulge my request to send me brown sauce (in exchange for candy corn) and sent me a full bottle along with some other particularly British food-y treats: a massive Kit-Kat, fruit pastilles (which I'm still unsure of how to pronounce -- "pas-tills" or "pasteels"?), and the aforementioned Smoky Bacon Crisps. Don't knock them till you've tried 'em. Upon receiving the box I opened it, read the enclosed cards, and then sat in one place smelling the HP Sauce for about 20 minutes. Fantastic. Even now when I just flip open the lid and smell it (like now, since I've finished the crisps and licked the package clean) I get this internal feeling of being somewhere else. Lovely.

I can't think of any other food smell related memories off the top of my head, but I think these British ones strike me so strongly because they're both distinctive and isolated with regards to most of my life experiences. Until the squeezy 425g bottle of browny goodness arrived, I found it nearly impossible to describe brown sauce to Americans. It's fairly impossible. And it doesn't help any that it's widely know as 'brown sauce' instead of HP sauce. Still. I made Sticky Toffee Pudding a couple of weeks ago in a similar attempt to recapture my Scottish culinary experiences, but it wasn't quite the same, probably due to error in my own cooking abilities and the fact that I didn't actually eat sticky toffee pudding all that often.

It's fashionable to knock British cuisine, but I miss it. Mark once told me the first thing he always ate upon making it home to Glasgow was a bacon roll. I could KILL for a bacon roll about now. I've even got the brown sauce to go on it. Mmmmm....

Gahh, my fingers still smell like the smoky bacon crisps! You must excuse me, I've got to sit very still and smell my hands for awhile -- can't waste the essence on my keyboard...