I overcooked the fish sticks tonight. I baked those little fishes until they were quite unlike themselves. To boot, I’d hailed this dinner, trumpeted its advent:
“Get excited,” I’d said to Willy in a text at lunchtime. “Nostalgia for supper!”
“O, good. . . I guess?” he replied.
So, in addition to feeling glum when I pulled out those igneous macadams, I felt silly. To add, I’d underboiled the peas, the mash came from a box; and somewhere in France, my mum was tutting. Shifting in her grave.
“Alexa. How is it possible…?”
In a recent article on the woeful fakeness and inexplicable ubiquity of “pumpkin flavor,” my friend Jeannette Batz Cooperman said this: “Nostalgia works powerfully on the appetite.” She was talking about our unceasing pursuit of what has been lost, of what we don’t have anymore – seasons of life when things were sweet and safe and cozy.
Which is why, perhaps, I didn’t dump my fish fingers in the bin where they belonged, but went at my plate like a hammerhead on chum.
But even though the sticks had the fibrous toughness of car tires, I was emptier than before and my jaws were weary. The past – the sweet back beyond – wasn’t in those forkfuls after all. And, let’s be honest, it wasn’t that sweet to begin with.
It is interesting to me that I turned to fish fingers for this auspicious weeknight supper when Carbonnade of boeuf, prawn vol au vents and coq au vin were also semi-regulars at my childhood table.
“Those sound pretentious,” Willy said, chewing through his humble, burnt-to-buggery repast. And I had to agree. My youth was full of haughty meals, usually French. And the stakes were high; there was appearance to think of. The milles feuilles had to have a thousand leaves; le canard was nothing without its bigarade. And a bland soubise? The tears were in an onion.
That food wasn’t really about nourishment at all.
But the fish fingers were. I was little and they were what I liked. I made faces in my mashed potato (peas for eyes). And I sat with my supper while my mum attended to, yes, more pompous foods for her foppish art history chums.
As I sat with my child at our kitchen table, I felt pathetic. Because, like lighting a Yankee Candle and hoping for a Galloway forest, I had been trying for something — curating a moment, panning for MEANING. It doesn’t work that way. And actually, I don’t know how it does.
Surprise may be part of it – picking up a wisp of nutmeg in a blob of potluck spinach; a tiny sweetness on the tongue because, one tent over, someone’s spinning sugar from a drum.
And it may be that we can’t plan for nostalgia because it has to come in quietly; a little ghost through a keyhole. Not a roomful of smoke.
AB - 21.11.23
Oh those last two lines, oh my heart.