Comment by delichon
3 days ago
I was seven years old in 1969 during the moon landing, with the whole extended family gathered around the enormous TV console. It was a very memorable event for me, but the thing I most remember is that mom made me and my friend a simple BLT with mayo. For some reason it was like a visitation from Jesus for both of us. We spent the next few years making them or begging for them relentlessly. We thought it was our own thing. Over the next fifty years I've tried to recapture that, but never entirely succeeded in reaching the same culinary apogee. Still trying. Every BLT comes with free a flashback to that hot July day. And a remembrance of that best of friends who we lost twelve years ago.
I have a similar thing here, albeit not tied to as vivid a memory of a day or of people-- just a memory of food.
I've been chasing a "white whale" bacon / egg / cheddar on grilled Texas toast sandwich I made 20-ish years ago that I've never been able to replicate. I didn't keep track of the particular bacon or cheddar I used, and I don't recall if the eggs were the farm co-op eggs we used to get or plain old grocery eggs. I should have taken notes but didn't.
It's probably a silly thing to do, but I keep fairly meticulous notes about food I make now (including weighing-out ingredients on a kitchen scale). I don't want to have another experience like my mythical sandwich.
My wife has a good point about my quest: I can't replicate my hunger level that day. That got me paying attention to how hunger effects food enjoyment. I now make a point of planning my eating ahead of special meals to maximize enjoyment. It's shocking, to me, how much a little hunger makes food better.
>That got me paying attention to how hunger effects food enjoyment.
I cured my lifelong pickiness thanks to an excessively long diet. The pickiness had tempered itself somewhat over the years, but my food choices were still quite limited compared to your average person.
On that diet, I lost about 50 pounds over 8 months and got to the leanest I've ever been, probably under 15% bodyfat. I knew better than to diet that long and the negative effects of diet fatigue, but dammit, I was determined and had to keep going!
The last few months I was constantly ravenous, tired, having trouble sleeping and absolutely obsessed with food. A few weeks later was Xmas dinner with the family, and when I arrived, I was shocked to discover that EVERYTHING on the table looked absolutely delicious to me. Foods I wouldn't have even imagined trying before. My pickiness was so severe, even attempting a bite would have previously caused a vomit response. I ate everything on that table that year and enjoyed nearly all of it. My family was stunned! It was like a dam broke, and now I am willing to try just about anything. It's been a great increase to my quality of life.
As an aside, I always hated hearing "What would you do if you were starving?" growing up. My contention was that if I were truly starving, any pickiness would disappear quite quickly. I mean people have resorted to cannibalism during times of famine! This experience completely validated my theory.
> It's probably a silly thing to do, but I keep fairly meticulous notes about food I make now (including weighing-out ingredients on a kitchen scale). I don't want to have another experience like my mythical sandwich.
Perhaps you do want those experiences, actually. Would your memory of this sandwich be as sweet if you were able to replicate whenever you want? How much of the seasoning here comes from its rarity?
I will concede that you may have a point.
There are things in my life I carefully mete out because I don't want to "burn out" then novelty. I'd like to think I could do that in this case, but I don't know how it would change the memory.
I feel strongly that our memories are a "lossy destructive read" type of mechanism (core memory that "forgets" to write-after-read sometimes). I often think about how I'm permuting memories I recall, even as I'm enjoying recalling them.
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In college I did an apple fast twice. Only eat apples and drink water for 3 days. You have to be careful doing this because you can end up very dehydrated. Whatever you eat after the 3rd day is the best meal of your life even though it's typically very simple. I would usually have something like a soup or very basic sandwich, it was still usually the most tasty thing I had ever eaten.
I find some freeze dried noodles and sauce in a mylar pouch are amazing after a long alpine hike, same with music; you have some luminous time in your life and the music you discovered around this time stays with you. God speed to your sandwich journey!
That reminds me of a day almost 30 years ago where I spent my last money and had a big pizza gyros. I went from starving to completely satiated. It was absolutely glorius. I’m still a big fan of pizza Gyros thanks to this special memorable occasion.
Food matters.
If you've ever done an extended fast (at least 36 hours, but ideally 60+) you'll know how rich your senses of smell and taste can be. In something as basic as a baked potato you can taste all sorts of nuances of sweetness, nuttiness and savoriness. Something like a steak explodes with such flavor as to border on a psychedelic experience.
This reminds me of a quote, "hunger is the best condiment".
Still trying.
Brands matter. See if you can match the brands that your mother used; especially the mayonnaise. Bacon will be harder to match.
In 1969, my family would have made its own mayonnaise, so try that, too.
If I want a flashback to my childhood, it's peanut butter and jelly. But it has to be Skippy peanut butter on Wonder bread with Smuckers jelly, and freezing cold whole milk. Anything deviation doesn't trigger the same brain cells.
Also try being 7 years old again, and watching the first moon landing on live TV.
Why is bacon harder to match? Was bacon different in the 60s?
Bacons vary widely even across brands today. It is very much not a simple commodity product. You are taking a living animal which may be of several different breeds and raised in any number of environments. You butcher it, itself a skilled occupation. Then cure it using a number of highly variable ingredients and parameters for a variable amount of time. Slice it with varying thickness.
Cured meats are entire world unto themselves. I have had bacon that tasted like a salty strip of cardboard, and bacon that is a peppery, savory, chewy/crispy revelation.
In many ways the BLT is sort of the perfect example food for showing how non-commoditized ingredients actually are. It's only five ingredients: bread, bacon, lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise. But each of those ingredients can vary extremely widely.
Take some generic white bread, thin cheap bacon, old iceberg lettuce, out of season grocery store tomatoes, and Miracle Whip and you'll have a result that you wouldn't understand why anyone on Earth would eat.
Then get some good bakery sourdough, thick cut heavily peppered bacon from a small farm that treats their pigs well, fresh butter or Bibb lettuce, late summer tomatoes from your own garden (the best tomatoes simply don't ship), and whip up a batch of mayo yourself without any preservatives using good eggs and oil. It will likely be one of the best meals you've ever eaten.
I believe there are studies about how the environment and who you are with changes your perception of food as well (it was some Radiolab podcast episode I believe). So you will never again have such a great sandwich, even if the exact same sandwich was brought back to you now. But I think it might be good that way - the free flashback and remembrance.
I remember one of my own "best steak ever" moments. It just never hit the same, even though I've had steaks 4x the price since then. I've also had a "best baguette ever" moment and I'm pretty sure it was just a regular baguette but my brain released an incredible amount of dopamine.
In remembrance of times past...your very own madeleine moment.
Show some young children the Apollo 11 movie. (Literally "Apollo 11.")
I was just going to show them the launch, but they all demanded to stay up late, told me to stop fast forwarding, and then had to sit and watch it again with each set of grandparents.
Another thing you can do is make sure critical parts of the Artemis streams (takeoff, approach to the moon, and landing) are on when you have children around. I texted the links to everyone I know.
I recently returned to a favorite cafe after a long time away. The amazing food I had many years ago seemed now to be just fine but not memorable.
I think the difference was the context. It was a date with a relationship that was going well. There was a lot of excitement. Now that relationship deteriorated and there is no excitement, and the food isn't as good. Maybe our memories are conflating the two things.
One thing I know for sure. You won't do it with bagged lettuce. You need a cool head of lettuce. Carry on.
I hear you. I'm chasing a simple dish of fish and pomegranate sauce I had in (Eastern European) Georgia 25 years ago, haven't been back but go to every Georgian restaurant and hope one day to see it on the menu.