I was eating toast, of all things, when I was struck by a very particular sense memory. Specifically, the toast I was eating suddenly tasted like the toasted rolls I had when I was a kid back in Scotland, and I was 12 years old again and eating the rolls in the kitchen of the house I grew up in. The sensation of eating childhood food again — even though I wasn’t, or at least, not exactly — sent my brain tumbling down a particular staircase that ended up with me suddenly realizing that there are all manner of flavors I’ll never taste ever again in my life.
When I was a kid, I had very specific favorite foods; it wasn’t just that I liked a particular dish, but I liked a particular dish as made at a particular restaurant or made by a particular person. I’m not sure if this was a latent super-taster tendency that dropped off later in life or simply being a particularly picky kid, but there were things that I loved that I knew very clearly that I would love even more so if came from one specific source. (I say “restaurant,” but I was a kid in Scotland; really, I mean “takeout place.” It’s where we all went; don’t judge. There is barely any Scottish cuisine if you remove the fish and chip shops, dammit.)
I remember with the utter certainty of a surly teenager that I loved shell pies but I particularly loved the ones from a local Italian takeaway. Was it really that different, or was I just oddly particular? I couldn’t tell you, looking back, although they probably used a different fat or flavoring to make it taste slightly different in a way that I preferred; the restaurant has changed hands — and maybe closed, then re-opened, if I remember correctly? — in the literal decades since I left the country, and the odds that I’d ever be able to eat that particular shell pie again are catastrophically slim.
Same with the frozen potato Alphabites — literally, fries but in the shapes of letters — that I loved so much, same with the slice sausage sandwiches my parents made, same with so many other foods that were favorites and so central to the hellscape that was my diet back in the day. All these foods that were comfort foods, things that could make my day better in almost any circumstance at the time. They’re all gone forever.
That’s probably a good thing; I can imagine revisiting some of them now and going, oh, this is terrible and then being embarrassed that I’d ever loved it so much in the first place. And yet, I find myself mourning those flavors more than a little. They did me a lot of good, way back when.