continued from above

Anyway, I have taste/smell memories from my childhood that haunt me. There was a bush that grew everywhere in Gambia, a relative of the pea family, I think, that had red and yellow flowers and produced flat pods with flat little seeds inside. The bush was used as an ornamental, but we used to pick the pods and eat them, and they had a lovely flavor. More pea-like than peas, concentrated and not starchy. Sometimes I get a little hint of it when I eat raw green peas, but it’s never the same. Once I saw a bush here that I thought was that plant, and I ate some of the seeds. I can’t remember how they tasted, but I got sick in the most “don’t leave the house” way for 24 hours afterwards.

Another taste I remember from Gambia is boiled fresh peanuts, and also corn roasted on charcoal fires. The corn was smaller than sweet corn on the cob, not sweet, and more concentrated in flavor. When I smell or taste things that are sort of similar to these things, I get a longing for them, though the memory is fading slowly. They seem forever lost to me, unless I return to Gambia. But who knows if they’d still be the same. My taste buds and sense of smell may have changed in the last 20 plus years. Also, the varieties I ate may not still being grown.

The reason I though of this is because on the evening Shingo asked about the blog I’d made a dish which was sort of based on a dish we ate in Gambia, called “Domada”. It is a meat dish with peanut sauce. For some reason I never really tried to make it before. But in the last couple weeks I’ve given it a couple of shots, sort of mixing inspiration from Thai/Malaysian cooking that also uses peanut sauce. It’s so yummy! Why didn’t I try this before? What other dishes from the past might I be able to recreate? My own version of the madeleines.