OPINION

Triggering Memories

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Pictured Recipe: EatingWell Fudge Brownies

Oven-Fresh Brownie & Cookie Recipes

And there, in a spotless kitchen that showed no signs of daily culinary wrangling, was a pan of brownies, still warm, resting on a rack. It was telegraphing all sorts of happy thoughts directly into my brain: Live in this house, it was saying, and you will always think happy thoughts. You will recall making brownies from scratch with your grandmother, recall her soft body and permanently delighted eyes, and how she taught you to use the cap of the vanilla extract as a measure instead of a teaspoon. You will remember the bake sale in second grade that introduced you to brownies with icing that you could peel off like a piece of sod and lodge on the roof of your mouth. You will remember your own daughter hovering as you added sugar to the chocolate and butter, waiting impatiently to lick the bowl.

I once read a story where the protagonist worked as a “house relaxer,” going around to vacation homes shortly before the arrival of their owners and baking chocolate chip cookies because the mere scent of them lulled the owners into believing that they actually lived there. It was like that with me and the brownies.

Smell is evocative, no question about it. This is because the body’s olfactory system is closely allied with the brain’s limbic system, and the limbic system is where we experience and process emotion. The olfactory system is also connected to the hippocampus, a small, cashew-shaped region of the brain that serves as the gatekeeper of memory. Memories that come through our nose, because they are paired like that, are durable. And since taste travels mainly on the odor molecules embedded in food, it’s the same for what we eat.

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