Food can often be a teleportation and time traveling device. It can transport you back to where you call home, into a buzzing Izakaya on a warm Tokyo night, or out onto a rickety plastic chair after a too-long karaoke session. Eating is a multisensory experience that can carve memories into your mind. The smells, sounds, sights, tastes, and company, among many factors, all contribute to the experience that’s stored in memory. Interestingly, all you really need is a smell or taste to evoke those memories. Olfactory memory (memory relating to smells and tastes) is known to be one of the most persistent and resistant to interference. We can leverage all of this to make food for ourselves that brings us back to certain times in our lives, or even teleports us to places we haven’t been before. Especially with limited travel, food acts as a medium between our experience and a distant place.
Last week, we played a game instead of cooking up a meal. The game has groups of people come up with a dish that evokes certain feelings in a specific setting. Some examples of the prompts include:
What would I eat to feel anxious, stressed, and euphoric at a bus stop in the suburbs?
What would I eat if I were rushing to get on a long flight and I missed home?
The result of these prompts ranged from wildly hilarious, to weirdly on-point. One of the common themes that popped up with the bus prompt was a hot and strong-smelling fish noodle soup. The strong smell, slurping noises, and broth spilling left and right would almost certainly catch some glares. But despite you stressing to make sure your broth doesn’t spill, and the social anxiety building from the glaring masses, the spicy broth gets you high with a tingly buzz.
We leaned into some escapism and thought of dishes that would quell our homesickness and fill us up while on a layover. The result is a whirlwind of ideas:
A charcuterie board with figs, cantaloupe, dried apricots, almonds, and prosciutto
Hand-torn noodle soup with a flavorful broth
Mushrooms and cabbage sautéed in butter
Oddly, different groups mostly shared a noodle/pasta theme. One group was shooting for a “universally comforting and nostalgic food,” and came up with noodles. We had one problem though: noodles require some time to rest. Our prompt has us rushing to get onto our flight, so we opted for Chinese-style hand-torn noodles because they only require a short resting period. We took a couple of elements from our charcuterie board: dried apricots and smoky salty pork. Finally, Hungarian cuisine inspired us to fry mushrooms and cabbage in butter. Bringing it all together, we have a subtly sweet, smoky, well-seasoned fried noodle dish pulling inspiration from all around the world to fill us up for the flight and remind us of home.
Constraints provide us guide rails to make decisions. Instead of a wide-open world of endless possibilities, we can breathe easy knowing what to look to for a decision. Next time you open your fridge, try to come up with a silly situation and a desired feeling to help you design your dinner!
Disclaimer: this game doesn’t churn out delicious food without fail. I still had to make this dish taste good. I initially added too many apricots, and a bit too much lemon juice. But the foundation was and is there. With some tweaking, this dish produces a delicious and hearty result. Noodles provide a vehicle for the flavorful sauce. Butter and mushrooms give it some body and flavor, while salty and smoky pork (pancetta, bacon, guanciale, or whatever you can find) provides a savory punch. The dried apricot sweetens along with the onions and cabbage to balance the savoriness, and garlic fills in the gaps.