The scent of certain simmering sauce transforms me into that child, that teen, again. I arrive home from school, maybe on a cold, slushy day, I push open the heavy door and immediately I know. My mother turns from the stove in her striped apron and wooden spoon. Sauce tonight. Or it’s a spring day and the windows are open, I’m dragging down the last block to my house after two hours on the water at crew practice. The smell of sauce reaches me and I pick up my pace to get home.
Unlike countless other stimuli we process in roundabout ways, scent benefits from a direct neural pathway to the brain, triggering the instant memory response. We all experience these sudden, vivid, emotional memories associated with scent. You catch whiff of a perfume or cologne and you’re face to face with an old love you haven’t thought about in years. You smell pipe tobacco and your uncle is back, sitting in that checked wing chair in your living room, lighting and sucking his pipe, the smoke suspended like webs above his head. And that cleaning product you smelled when you walked into the office on a weekend? That’s exactly the air in the hallways of your elementary school.
This type of memory is called the Proust effect, in honor of the writer Marcel Proust. He believed these sudden memories conjured by scent—he called them “involuntary memories”—contained the essence of our pasts. He used involuntary memory as a transition device in his novel. The narrator is reminded of his childhood when he tastes a madeleine cake dunked in tea, prompting him to fill in the backstory on his early years. As a literary device, it’s standard blocking and tackling, but the idea of involuntary memories is fascinating.
My mom, Irene, a spirited Italian girl who grew up on 19th Street in Niagara Falls, this is how she did it: brown the pork in the bottom of a deep pot, garlic, sometimes a piece of braciole she’d rolled and tied. Then the tomato products, rinsing the cans with water, adding the herbs, the spices, the secret ingredient, simmer on the stove for hours. Fry the meatballs in the cast iron skillet, add them to the sauce.
Spaghetti, meatballs, pork, and sauce—at least twice a week. Sometimes the second night we’d have a different shape—penne, ziti, or if my grandma was over she and my mom might have made pasta. If my mom wanted to do something special, she’d make lasagna on Sundays. I was an enthusiastic and grateful eater, loving every bite.
I learned to cook my mom’s sauce, and can conjure the memories of her kitchen and my grandmother’s. Sure, I’ve got a variation on the recipe, we all do. I insist on a pour of red wine into the sauce, but that might be as much an excuse to open a bottle as it is to personalize the recipe.
I made sauce tonight. It was delicious. I visited those kitchens of long ago, I saw my mom.
