The Elusive Food Memory

Today over breakfast we got in a discussion of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. The southern alternative to Duncan Doughnuts' cake doughnut, Krispy Kremes are a made with a yeast dough and are covered in a thin glaze. When they are fresh and hot they, melt in your mouth and to me are all that a doughnut should be. Every year at the beach when the "Hot Now" sign is on at the Krispy Kreme store we will get a box of regular glazed doughnuts and an assortment box of cream and jelly filled. The cream-filled, chocolate glazed are so rich and so sweet that they are really too much, but every year we get a box. While we were talking this morning I found out the reason we always get the box of cream-filled is that my mom has a childhood memory of eating one and to the palate of a child it was perfect. Then the cream was more likely a made-from-scratch pastry cream rather that the sort of "whipped topping" that fills them now. Regardless of the change every year we get a box of the cream-filled as my mother tries to rediscover that early first taste.

Childhood food memories are usually exaggerated, by memory itself or by the newness of childhood experiences. Often they are impressed with the time and place, more than likely a special event or a special person rather than the actual food itself. The food has been tied in with that event and is often the only remaining element you can try to recreate.
My mother has told me of many food memories, the taste of a bottled coke and a grill cheese sandwich from the city drug store, the first taste of a vinaigrette at Sardis in New York City, the first time she ate tacos with a Texan roommate, all of these things impressionable and sweet for a young woman who did not grow up with an endless stream of food choices and a bombardment of food and recipes from the TV and magazines. Food was still new. You could go to New York and not know what a vinaigrette was or stumble across Feta cheese on a menu and not know what to expect. (Both of which now can be found on a McDonald's salad)

This conversation led me to realize that I have very few childhood food memories. It seems that most of the food I enjoyed as a child I can still eat now and the things I first tried as an adult I knew what it was and it was not exotic or new to me but something I had read about in a magazine or seen on TV and was eager to try.
I love food and am a foodie to the core. To write, think, and eat food is the way I live my life, but sometimes I wish I had not been so exposed. That I could wander into some little French bistro someday and not know what to expect when I tried that first oyster.
But that will not be the case. All I can hope for is that the feeling of the night will be perfect and the company better, as I take in a moment with the taste of the sea.