The tomato
Like an Apple
When I was a child, I could eat a tomato straight from the plant.
No salt. No plate. No recipe.
Just a tomato.
It had perfume. Real flavour. Enough character to be eaten alone.
Peppers could be eaten the same way. Fresh from the plant. I liked them too, but never as much as the tomatoes.
Today I still eat tomatoes. I just do not meet that same tomato very often.
The tastes that return first
Morning
Wargia in My
Wooden Bowl
There is a morning taste I still think about.
Wargia.
Hot soup. My favourite wooden bowl.
I have eaten soup many times since. I have never found one that gives me exactly that feeling.
Maybe the bowl mattered. Maybe the morning mattered. Maybe being a child mattered.
I only know that the taste and the memory arrive together.
My grandmother's coffee
I Am Still Waiting
for My Brain to Recognise It
Her coffee was brown. Light. A little sweet. With milk. And spices.
Which spices? I do not know.
That is part of the problem.
My mother says she knows the ingredients. She has never made it for me at home. Maybe one day we will try.
I keep discovering coffee when I travel. Vietnamese coffee. Gulf coffee with cardamom. Different roasts. Different ways of preparing it.
I enjoy all of that.
But I am still waiting for the taste that makes my brain say: this is it.
The bread
We Did Not Know
What We Had
The bread was cooked in an earth oven with palm wood.
The flour was whole. Less filtered. You could still see fibre in it.
The wheat could be ground on stone.
As children, that was simply bread.
Bakery bread could even seem better to us then because it was softer and sweeter.
Later, I began to understand what the homemade bread had.
Grain. Fire. Earth. Smoke.
Sometimes you recognise the value of a taste only after easy access to it has disappeared.
Leben
Light, Fresh,
with Traces of Butter
The leben I remember was light.
Fresh.
Sometimes there were small traces of butter inside.
The milk came from animals raised around a very different way of life from the dairy products I know today.
I have tried leben many times since.
Often I find it too thick. Or too flat. Or simply missing the taste I am waiting for.
If I could recover only one of these lost tastes, leben would be high on the list. But so far, nothing has quite done it.
The trees
Every Fruit Had
Its Own Character
Peaches. Pomegranates. Dates.
Each had its own character.
There was one pomegranate tree we especially liked. Its fruit had almost no seeds to bother us.
And there was a date palm whose fruit I loved. The dates were on the dry side. The flavour was different.
I still cannot find that taste.
Fruit eaten directly from a tree has something that disappears very quickly.
Even familiar dishes changed a little
Not Enough to Become
Another Dish
Douez still tastes like douez.
Couscous still tastes like couscous.
The difference is smaller there. Spices carry a lot of the flavour.
But I still notice certain things.
Olive oil used to feel stronger to me. More present. We used it in almost everything.
Smen had its place too.
Today neutral oils appear more often in some cooking around me. Oil produced with modern machines does not always give me the same strong taste I remember.
Then there was the smoke. The wood. The earth oven.
Small differences. But memory notices them.
The taste of water
Still the Best
to Me
Well water belongs in this memory too.
Clear. Cold. Especially good in the heat.
We drank it directly.
Even today, well water remains the best water to me.
Maybe the temperature was part of it. Maybe thirst. Maybe being outside.
Whatever the reason, I still know the feeling.
Why the taste changed
It Is Never
Only One Reason
I think the products changed.
The way they are grown changed. Seed varieties changed. The way food is transformed changed.
In the Meski I knew as a child, much of what surrounded us was grown first because people needed to eat.
Animal manure was used more. Production was smaller. The goal was not always the same as today.
Now agriculture often has to produce more and produce for sale.
Life also became easier in many ways. That is not a bad thing.
We gain things. We lose others.
And I changed too.
A child eating a tomato in a field is not tasting with the same memory as an adult searching for that tomato decades later.
And then there were the people
Food Seemed to Have
More Time
In my memories, people seemed to cook with more time.
The environment was part of the recipe. The ingredients were part of it. The person cooking was part of it.
Today life moves faster.
Sometimes the goal becomes simple: finish cooking, eat, move to the next thing.
I have even noticed changes in my mother's cooking over the years.
The same person. The same family.
But time changes habits. Energy changes. Ingredients change.
Taste changes with them.
What cannot be reproduced exactly
You Can Rebuild a Recipe.
You Cannot Rebuild a Moment.
You can search for the same spices.
You can grind wheat on stone.
You can build an earth oven and burn palm wood.
You can look for old seeds, stronger olive oil, good smen, fresh milk.
You may come close.
Very close.
But you cannot put together the same land, the same people, the same house, the same hunger, the same age and the same morning.
Maybe that is why some tastes do not disappear. They become memories instead.