If your heart was a food, what would it be?

If my heart was a food it would be a chocolate cake covered in a thick chocolate cream. It would be rich, sweet and a little warm just like the memories I have tucked away there. 

My first memory of chocolate cake involves my grandmother in our old farmhouse’s kitchen. I would have been no more than seven. It was a one bowl recipe where everything was added into the bowl and mixed up with my mother’s Sunbeam mix master.  We baked it in the wood-fired slow combustion stove in the alcove and ate it together at the kitchen table in the centre of the chequered linoleum floor.

I would have to agree with psychologist Susan Whitbourne who says,  “Food memories feel so nostalgic because there’s all this context of when you were preparing or eating this food, so the food becomes almost symbolic of other meaning.”

Food memories are also powerful and more sensory than other memories. Psychologists say this is because they are shaped by all of our senses.  They are also shaped by the company, the situation and the emotions involved.

Food memories work both ways. I still struggle to eat corn relish as I associate this food with the stomach flu that coincided with eating a belly full of it.  I can still remember where I tasted it first and also remember the room where I threw it up!

Decades have passed since I made my first chocolate cake.  My passion for baking has not waned. In fact, the more stressful I find life, the more you will find me in the kitchen baking.  I have moved on from a one bowl recipe (although I still have that one) to my favourite chocolate cake which is now a flourless one, which requires all sorts of complex processes and finished with a rich chocolate ganache.  One of my biggest joys is working alongside a young person and teaching them how to bake too; just like my grandmother did all those years ago. 

Food means so much more than what we cook and what we eat. What memories does food evoke for you?  What memories are you creating?  If your heart was a food, what would it be? 

Photo by Jasmine Waheed on Unsplash