Scented memories stir up the senses
A few years ago, my step-daughter presented me with a lovely potted plant for a special celebration which I ungratefully cannot recall. It could have been Christmas, my birthday or even Father’s Day. The only thing that I really remember is the fragrant scent that brought memories flooding back. It was a type of mint that grows wild in Northern Algeria and hence its name, Algerian Mint which is used widely to flavour the ubiquitous North African daily mint tea. A sweet, fragrant tea poured into tiny glasses from a height by expert tea makers. When I was a teenager, I spent most of my free afternoons with friends inside cool cafés playing dominoes or the French card game of Belote. The days before mobile phones. My friends and I used to make one glass of tea last for hours. The poor waiter, usually sent over by the owner, begged us to buy more tea or risk being thrown out of the place to make room for more profitable customers. Not that anyone else but a few of us students on holiday dared to venture out in the searing heat of the midday sun.
Whenever I go back to visit my hometown, as I get within a few kilometres of Souk-Ahras arriving from the North, my senses become submerged with the taste and flavour of minted tea. In Spring, the countryside around my hometown is draped with delicious aromas of wild peppermint. The intense fragrance of this wild mint is unique to the area. Simply thinking about it, drowns my whole being in cool, refreshing scents.
Throughout the cold months, my mint plant looks like a twig, but as the days begin to warm up with the start of summer, it gradually comes to life and flourishes for a couple of months to provide many cups of delicious minted tea.
On two other occasions, smells have immediately triggered memories from a long way back.
When I worked in the kitchen at our Seaton Carew restaurant, I sometimes walked across the road on a warm summer’s evening, to sit by the paddling pool for a few moments before service and reflect on my sailor days or happy summer holidays spent by the Med.
Once, on one of the warmest days of the year, one August in the nineties, I found myself hungering for grilled sardines. The salty and fishy smell of the North Sea surprisingly awoke lovely memories of the Mediterranean. I was transported back in an instant to Collo, a tiny fishing village where my family and I spent many Summer holidays at my uncle’s. Several times during our stay, he went very early in the morning to the fish quay to buy freshly landed sardines straight off the trawlers. For lunch, leaving the sardines whole and unwashed to retain the salty sea flavour, his wife grilled trayfuls of them on a charcoal barbecue. She served them simply with sliced spring onions, wedges of lemon and chunks of French baguettes.
Anyone who has ever gone up or down Crimdon Bank on a warm night won’t have failed to notice the scent of wild garlic which wafts from the Dene.
For the ten years that we lived in Horden in the nineties, I passed the spot four times on most days. At the height of the British summer, as I drove home late at night after service, the smell of garlic invaded the car. These days, wherever I happen to be, if I get a whiff of wild garlic or even burnt garlic, my mind always drifts back once again to the rare warm summer evenings that transform Crimdon Dene into an outdoor kitchen.