The Quilt Inn Country Cookbook

Aliske Webb

The Nose Remembers When

A warm spring day at the the Inn makes me restless. I’ve been storing energy

all Winter and need to get out and go somewhere. I start to think of foreign trips to

take. With all the Spring planting and general clean-up-after-winter work to be done that

isn’t usually possible.

So instead, when I want a day off, I take my nose for a walk. I cut fresh grass,

toss hay in the barn, smell the freesias, dig in the newly-exposed moist earth, or rub my

face in the warm fur of a cat. Like a detective or a bloodhound on a hunt, I’m scenting

out smells to stimulate me because I know that every odor that comes accidentally or

intentionally to my nose will instantly whisk me away to times and places in memory

more quickly than a jet could carry me to an exotic locale. It’s a vacation in recall that

I can return to and from without jetlag and come back refreshed every time.

It’s no wonder our noses are right in the middle of our faces, up front and

sticking out where we can poke it into things. Neuroanatomists tell us that is it’s a very

short distance from the receptor cells in the nose to the target cells in the brain, to those

bumpy brows and frontal lobes that we worked so hard through the millennia to

develop. By contrast, your fingers are a long way from your brain. If your nose was any

closer to the brain, it would be your brain. (And maybe in some ways it is.) The fact that

your nose has this enviable “local call” connection gives the environment an opportunity

to wage an upfront and personal attack on our brains, especially on our memories,

through our senses.

Smells evoke emotionally charged memories as pungently as an electrical

probe surgically applied directly to your grey cells would. (Don’t try is at at home!) The

other senses are not so directly and uncompromisingly connected to the memory

banks. Pinch your arm and you’re unlikely to immediately be transported to another

time and place where you experienced a similar pinching sensation. Look at water

cascading over rocks in a garden. Does it make you recall standing at the foot of a

waterfall in the forest? You may know the memory is there and with some mental effort,

connect the two but rarely does sight or touch trigger memory of such sensational, fully

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Country Cooking