Food that remembers for us...

Marcel Proust got there first, as he usually did, and at considerably greater length than necessary. In his wordy work "In Search of Lost Time" he describes in encyclopedic detail how a mouthful of a Madeleine dipped in his tea, prompted his entire forgotten childhood in Combray to come flooding back. The small sponge cake unlocking several hundred pages of Proustian prose. Most of us might have just muttered "nice" and got on with our day.

But young Marcel was onto something...

Taste and smell have a peculiar way of not really hanging with the present moment. That coveted "now" time the rest of us are desperate to stay in, is not the chosen domain of our major senses. They are past-tense players. They remind us of the distantly familiar - faces, flavours, and the far-off fanfare of the ice-cream van.

This is the quiet magic of food - it remembers for us. We don’t have to do the work; the dish does it.

Ever-so-affable Chef Raymond Blanc, who I have had the pleasure of meeting many times, spent a lifetime chasing the ghost of his mother’s cooking. He once described a memory that seems to undo him to this day: “...entering the kitchen and being surrounded by the fragrance of tomatoes.”

Not the taste first, note - but the smell. His mother ripened them on the window sill and served them plainly, with shallots, a little salt to draw out the sweetness, and bread to mop up what was left. Years later, it became a dish on a two-star Michelin menu, his “essence of tomato” - is really more just "essence of boy" - the one stood quietly at the kitchen door, memorizing the moment.

That is the thing about food: it doesn’t ask us to remember. It remembers for us, and hands it back when we’re really not expecting it. We embrace the prompt. The imprint. The marriage of meat in pastry, pork crackling with apple sauce - and there we are again.

I am pretty sure that every family has these recipes - the ones that are about mood more than food. The dishes that hold an accidental hold over us, disappearing for decades at a time, until we inadvertently rediscover their dominion over a small part of our brain. That small part even has a name - the limbic system - though the architecture hardly matters. What matters is the wiring.

Smell, in particular, is the sense that refuses to queue. Sight and sound appear rather more polite and orderly, passing through the brain’s relay systems before being sorted and labelled. Smell has unusually intimate connections with the regions involved in emotion and memory, which may explain why the ache can arrive before the thinking part of us has even worked out what we’re smelling. We don’t decide to be eight again, with frosting-covered faces. Distant familiarity decides that for us. Taste arrives alongside it, usually holding hands.

It is more edible séance than edible science.

France, methinks, seems particularly well tuned to this. Recipes, rituals and regional habits are passed around with far less embarrassment, as though food were another way of keeping time.

The French have turned culinary memory into something approaching a national operating system. Food does not just appear here with the cadence of that lovely film "Shirley Valentine", and Joe's insistence that Thursday night was steak night; France keeps a wider calendar. Which adds another tool to the memory shed. The toasted almonds of Galette des Rois in January. The February waft of slightly burned batter from the crêpes of La Chandeleur.

You can tell what month it is, just by walking blindfolded through a French farmers market.

Brittany through buckwheat, cider and salted butter. The south-west, thick with duck, beans and things cooked slowly. Provence through olive oil, garlic and snappy tomatoes. Alsace through fermenting cabbage, and fifty shades of sausage.

Travel through France with a fork and a napkin and every few hundred kilometres somebody will tell you that what you are eating is not merely the local speciality, but just how their mothers made it. There is a narrative. This is one of the things I love about food in France. It is never entirely about food. It is place. Season. Family. Backstory. Identity. Memory.

OK look... it's not just a French thing. That is ridiculous. It is a human construct. Food becomes important when anyone leaves anywhere. We start recreating geography on a plate. The Frenchman abroad searches for proper butter. A Lebanese cook will hanker after the overload of parsley in a tabbouleh. A Jamaican businessman might well travel with his Mum's jerk seasoning, because nothing else comes close.

It's not hunger, it is orientation. We are trying to locate ourselves.

Smell is particularly ruthless about this. It can return you to a place with almost indecent speed. Fried onions bizarrely remind me of my childhood birthdays. Coffee for some people might serve up a wet and windy camping trip. Woodsmoke can summon an entire winter spent in Belgium.

No photograph quite does that. Photographs compel you to remember. Food simply opens the door and asks that you remove your size 10 shoes.

Recipes, too, are peculiar little family archives - and they are the absolute keystone to unlocking our memory. Things were cooked and baked and stirred with what was in the cupboard. It bore the semblance of same. Predictable and practised. That is what built the memory muscle of remembring back. Most, if not all of Grandma's scones and biscuits were determined by scarcity.

Now we almost struggle with the obligations to mess it up, largely through an eye-watering pantry abundance and the reach of supply chain supermarkets. Our pans welcome miso and zatar, yuzu and gochujang.

Everything can be elevated, given a twist, made global. And so the uncomfy question creeps in: are we improving these dishes - simply unable to leave them alone? Or are we diluting those memorable smells and tastes, and taking them beyond the reach of memory? Is a swirl of harissa through the chicken gravy a genuine betterment, or just our restlessness, our terror of the plain, our need to leave a thumbprint on something purely because we can?

Some of it is real. Some of it is vanity dressed up as curiosity. The hard part is telling which. All I suspect, is that it will be much more difficult for my Grandkids to remember the essence of a tomato if I mug it with the spice drawer.

Practical items from my Dad’s estate feel much more finite. The watch goes here, the silver teapot ends up there. An object can usually belong to only one person. Food multiplies. Everyone can inherit the soup. All six grandchildren can faithfully make the cake.

A recipe is one of those rare family possessions that becomes more valuable the more people copy it. It can be taken home or carried across borders, continents and generations, in a notebook of scribbles and then consigned to memory. Slight drifts will always have a tendency be edited with a "Yep...that's better.."

Although paradoxically, if we could reproduce everything perfectly, maybe memory would lose some of its pull. The near-miss actually matters. The cake is close, but not quite. The sauce is good, but hers was better. Just by an inch...

And that inch is where our grandmas live.

On Platform 13, wholeness isn’t found - it’s remembered. Because loss is loss, worthiness is universal, and no one is alone. We are all in this together.