Recently I realised I can time travel with nothing but a glug of oil. That was all it took to throw me through the years. That glug-glug of oil.
It took me to the snap-snap of an old gas hob praying it could light one last flame. The bang of pierced plastic over pre-diced Costcutter chicken, or – more likely – that one fast slice to sever six slick hotdogs from a slippery prison.
The rustle of a bloated mixed stir-fry bag then tumbled into a cheap wok and the high-pitched CHHHHHH because it was way too hot and now everything’s ruined.
That pour of oil took me back to my 20s: the first time I’d ever had oil to pour.
Those cheap 10-minute meals were much quicker than the meals I’d grown up with.
In childhood, it was better, slower, and someone else was doing it.
I’d hear the lazy rattle of the cutlery drawer in the kitchen first.
The chop of a carrot, and the knowledge that soon my Swiss mum would bring me one as a sort of budget starter.
I’d hear the muffled blare of Radio 2. Pots, pans. A drawerful of little-used obscure metallic implements collected over decades and clinking against each other like tiny suits of armour. After an age, the crank-crank of the old wooden peppermill.
The summoning call she’d make each night through the house: “Esssss-ennnn!”
And then you eat.
Whole chunks of life can be portioned by sounds. Food provides its own powerful soundtrack, reminding us of great times, as well as those that could do with a little work, like the sounds that accompanied the first solo meals of my late teens:
The canned meat from the local Tesco. The psssh and creak of the opener, the repeated piercings as it lost its grip, the relief of the light clang as the lid hit the worktop, and then the dull heavy thudding plop of congealed and dubious meat on a cheap Argos pan.
You were in a hurry to eat in those days, a hurry to go out, or a hurry because you’ve been out, a hurry because you’re starving, a hurry because it doesn’t matter, because it’s just dinner, there’s another one tomorrow, so what if it plops?
Sounds fire off powerful memories, says Chester Santos, the “International Man of Memory”.
Santos is a winner of the USA Memory Championships and can remember 100 new names in 15 minutes. He’ll also always draw on the sound of popcorn popping. It launches him straight back to Saturday afternoons with friends watching movies. Same with that drifting, toasted kernel smell; the senses working as time machine.
“Generally,” he says, “sound is the poorer younger brother to smell in terms of ability to trigger memories. The olfactory bulb, which processes smell, is directly connected to the amygdala, which processes emotion, and the hippocampus, which processes memory.”
He considers food, dinners, meals to fall under emotional experience or “episodic memory”, where people remember life’s feels over facts and figures.
You remember how the meal warmed your heart, not how many mango habanero chicken wings you ate, what they cost, or anything covered by “semantic memory”. The experience imprints. And a clear, definitive sound connected to your past can bring back details you might never have remembered again.
“Strong emotions connecting sound to a meal,” says the International Man of Memory, “can outweigh the advantage smell has as a memory trigger.”
My early 30s, and we were learning how to cook. I’d been a we awhile by now, and she and I were realising cooking was actually a thing people did.
Now we were going to loud markets, picking up bits and bobs and bulbs, drinking screeching barista coffees, scraping back metal chairs from cold stiff metal tables.
Then, cheeks fresh, after the clink of pints at the Crown, we’d huddle in the evening, care for each other.
Sounds included the braaap as you wring the neck of a fresh bottle of wine.
The spring-fresh zzzzest of a supermarket lemon.
The noisy kiss a last squeeze from a squeezed-out bottle of honey makes.
Maybe another braaap.
Oh, we were in our element.
And then we ate.
James Mansell is professor of cultural history and sound studies at the University of Nottingham. At the start of each academic year, he asks his students to think of a sound that reminds them of home. “More often than not,” he says, they think of “sounds from the kitchen. Scraping. Tapping.” The sound of care being taken. “Kettles boiling for a comforting cup of tea. Sometimes humming and singing as an evening meal is prepared.”
He says these “everyday sounds, although we might not think of them as very important, play a role in making us who we are. They’re the soundtrack of our intimate selves. Food and cooking are strongly entwined with memories of loved ones, caregivers, who have cooked for us in the past.”
He cites one example a student gave: “The sound of a wedding ring knocking against a rolling pin as pastry is rolled out.”
Back to my house, and what seemed like moments after that clink of pints in the Crown we had kids and had to be careful not to wake them with the harried late-night overtired stabs of a blunt pair of scissors into the tight film of an M&S Thai green curry.
Sometimes dinners would be on my own in the city.
I’d eat late after work – “no, just for one please” – at a little Indian place down a side street.
I can feel the hubbub of muted first dates, strangers cautiously testing humours, squeaking cheap knives across broad plates to gentle piped-in sitar strings, before a jolt as HOW IS YOUR MEAL IS EVERYTHING OK! came at full volume from a man in a red waistcoat.
And every time, the momentary celebratory sizzle of a fancy dish on a fancy plate making its way past your table to make someone else’s evening.
Christine Hà is a chef and the owner of the Blind Goat restaurant in Houston, Texas. Sound is particularly key for her.
“By sound,” she says, “I know if a skillet is hot enough to sear a steak. Or saute some garlic. I know when water is boiling, or if a soup has reached simmering.”
Hà started losing her vision in 2004 and by 2012 was the first blind contestant on MasterChef USA. For her, the sound of food, of kitchens, of prep, takes her straight back to her mother’s side, the mother she lost when she was just 14.
“There are two sounds in particular,” she says. “One is the sound of a knife chopping or mincing on a cutting board. This brings me back to my earliest memories of my mom cooking in the kitchen, perhaps chopping onion for pho or mincing shrimp for her beloved egg rolls. The other sound is the simple clanging of a lid being placed back on a stockpot.”
That clang is the sound not of a meal finished, but of a meal in development, a meal finding its feet. The sound of care taken.
“I’d hear that clang a lot from my mom, my aunts and mygrandma, whenever they were making Vietnamese noodle soups, as they tasted the broth throughout many hours of cooking …”
These days, Hà’s favourite sounds are “the sound of someone helping themselves to seconds or thirds: that clanging of that pot lid coming off the vessel, the serving spoon sloshing more stew into a bowl, or a spatula scraping inside a pan to get another piece of chicken. This means my husband or the people I’m feeding liked my cooking enough to get more.”
This, all this, followed closely by “the sound of a dishwasher starting up its cycle because that means I’m done. Or the sound of someone else spraying and wiping down the kitchen counters, because that means I don’t have to clean up after cooking …”
In my 40s now, and in the house when the kids are in bed, they’ll hear the pull of the drawer and the clatter of cutlery. The chop of that first carrot. The crunch as I eat one – that same cheap childhood starter, as tradition dictates.
Then the papery rustle of unwrapping garlic, the crush and roll of the press.
The odd braaap of another you-know-what.
One of us will use the good knife on the no-longer-canned meat, and the coriander, and the chorizo, and whatever else we need now that I definitely didn’t need (and also couldn’t pronounce) back when I was beginning and burning everything; back when nightly I was forging hot woks in cold dishwater under clouds of black smoke to the scream of a fire alarm.
But these new sounds are what our kids will hear as they drift off.
The phlank of a shut microwave door, obviously.
The roar of a hot oven opened for chips.
But also, on better nights, the easy slice, the quick zip of cut celery, new potatoes tossed lightly in a bowl,the rough chop of parsley, stalks sliced through with a quiet snap.
The frying, the salting, the boiling, the simmering – though the kids will be asleep by this bit – and that last set of noises just for us, the coda: the pouring, the serving, the ba-beep as you turn off the heat on a hob that’s not on its last legs and lets your own small world know everything’s ready.
Calmly now, the television low in another room, you time travel again.
You slide out the favourite bowl to give to the girl you used to drink at the Crown with, the one you bought the bits and bobs and bulbs with, way back when.
You place the fork down for her, gently, just far enough away from that bowl, so it doesn’t clank and wake the new ones upstairs.
And then you eat.
Somebody Told Me by Danny Wallace (Ebury) will be published in May
