Dreaming of a Tasty Christmas in Paris

Taste memories are funny things, especially when the food evoking them seems as though it couldn’t be farther from the food that’s being remembered. Since arriving in Paris, I’ve eaten a lot of things you can’t find in America, but I’ve occasionally found flavors of home in unexpected places.

I loved the toasted chèvre, honey, and spinach sandwich on pain pavé that I ordered at a Cosi-like sandwich chain called Bert’s one Sunday after a yoga class. It was only days later, when I was eating a second—the warm bread dense and chewy, the filling smooth and sweet—that I realized that it tasted almost exactly like one of the bagels that I ate in the mornings before high school with cream cheese and a drizzle of honey.

I recently ordered a slice of an apricot-and-pistachio tart for my afternoon pastry, attracted by its picture-perfect appearance: shiny apricot halves carefully arranged over a light green, marzipan-like filling, all strewn with toasted pistachio bits. I wasn’t expecting it to fill me with recollections when I bit into it, but what I found in my mouth was the spitting taste-image of my grandmother’s peach pie, made with fresh peaches from Fredericksburg, Texas, not far from my hometown of Austin.

These mouthfuls of familiarity, concealed behind unlikely façades, have been a startling yet comforting reminder of the universality of food. Different cultural traditions put ingredients together in different ways, depending on chance and environment. But unlooked-for taste memories are proof that different societies agree implicitly that certain flavor combinations taste good. New Yorkers and Jews may poke holes in single-serving rolls and boil them with malt before baking them, but the result is the same goodness as the boulangère’s traditional pain pavé. Parisians may prefer dainty apricots and an ornamented appearance, but the goodness—the inexplicable beauty of baked stone fruit and fat and sugar in the mouth—is the same as the goodness of my grandmother’s pie.

The neurobiological mechanism behind taste and memory remains enigmatic, even as researchers work out more and more of the brain’s mysteries. What is clear is that taste and smell (which is closely linked to our perception of taste) are processed in the primitive limbic system, which includes the amygdala, where strong emotions are processed, and the hippocampus, where long-term memories are stored.

Now is the time of year when advertisers try to induce and exploit food associations. Starbucks, in one of the most egregious displays of a company trying to reserve a permanent place in your hippocampus, rolls out its “Holiday Drink Trio”—the Eggnog Latte, the Peppermint Mocha, and the Gingerbread Latte—proclaiming, “A holiday tradition continues.” (In an example of the near-universality of food advertising, the Starbucks locations in Paris mount an almost identical campaign to that of the States, with advertisements for its seasonal Mocha Praliné and Latte Crème Brûlée screaming “Pass the Cheer—Faites Plaisir.”)

Attempts to tie food to memory aren’t always motivated by profit. What are the holidays, if not attempts at recreating a past feeling by recreating past dishes? Why do families make the same recipes, year after year, if not in an attempt to evoke the same good feelings, year after year? Without food, I suspect, the feelings of nostalgia (or, for some, dread) that come in late December would not be nearly so strong.

But what I love about the relationship among taste, emotion, and memory is that it’s too complicated to be easily manipulated by advertising campaigns, or even benign family traditions. In my experience, the most vivid taste memories come when I’m not expecting them, and when I’m not trying to elicit them. Proust found lost time by eating the same madeleines soaked in tea that he had eaten in childhood. But taste memories have so much to do with the tongue and the brain, and so little to do with the eyes, that I would bet that the same ingredients twisted into a different treat—a tea-flavored pound cake, perhaps—would evoke an equally strong recollection.

I’ll be spending Christmas in Paris this year. My parents and sister are coming to stay with me, and we’ll cobble together a Christmas eating experience in my small apartment kitchen with the decidedly non-American ingredients we find at open-air marchés and French supermarkets. We’ll do what we can to make the familiar dishes we always make at Christmas—my father’s Christmas morning yeasted coffeecake, my mother’s famous cornbread dressing. We’ll probably venture into French holiday traditions, too, like the rich bûche de noël, a dense chocolate jelly roll cake coated thickly in chocolate or coffee buttercream frosting that is fashioned to look like a log (and sometimes even coated with meringue or marzipan mushrooms).

But, as much as we try to create strong memories by pairing them with specific foods, there’s no telling which new food that I try during these next few weeks will quietly make a deep impression on my brain. There’s no telling, that is, until years from now, when I am again surprised by a new-looking but familiar-tasting food. And then—uncontrollably, mysteriously, beautifully—my Christmas spent in Paris will all come flooding back.