Which meals would you hire a food detective to find?
My wife and I recently read and enjoyed Hisashi Kashiwai’s The Kamogawa Food Detectives, in which a father/daughter duo track down long-lost recipes from people’s pasts including half-remembered childhood favorites, delicacies from restaurants that closed decades ago, and so on.
It’s a delightful book (read my review) filled with mouth-watering descriptions of amazing meals, and it honors the role that nostalgia often plays as a “secret ingredient” in our favorite meals as well as the importance of food in shaping our most cherished memories and relationships.
Kashiwai’s book — which can easily be read in a single weekend — got us thinking about the meals from our past that we’d like to rediscover and re-experience. In other words, if I could find a food detective agency, these are the dishes that I’d hire them to track down.
Grandma Morehead’s Chocolate Cake — I occasionally go through a phase where I bake a lot of cakes, often employing the box mix hack. But nothing I make holds a candle to the chocolate cake that my grandma used to make 35+ years ago. It was dense and thick, and still good even after being stuck in the freezer for God knows how long, especially when topped with her homemade chocolate frosting. I did have her recipe at one point, having typed it out on her old typewriter, but I lost it many, many years ago. I sure would like to make it again, sometime, though.
The Garden Cafe’s Perfect French Dip — I love French Dip sandwiches. They’re a fairly straightforward sandwich — take a toasted bun, pile it high with slices of prime rib, cheese, and maybe some onions, mushrooms, and/or green peppers, and serve with a side of au jus — but it can be surprisingly hard to get a good one. (Case in point, I ordered a French Dip at three different restaurants during our family’s recent vacation, and all three were subpar.) For many years, my go-to French Dip has been the one at Lazlo’s. But if I had to pick the best French Dip I’ve ever had, it’d be the one I ate back in the late ’90s or early ’00s at the Garden Cafe on north 27th St., a restaurant that’s been closed for decades.
The Honeymoon Pie — We decided early on that we wouldn’t skimp on food during our honeymoon in Washington state, and as a result, we enjoyed a lot of great meals at some really cool restaurants. But the dish I remember most from our honeymoon was a slice of blackberry pie that I ordered at some random truck stop diner. I don’t normally like fruit pies — I’m more of a cheesecake kind of guy — but this blackberry pie was incredible. That was undoubtedly due, in part, to the fact that we honeymooned during the height of berry season. In any case, I still dream about that pie. If we ever return to the Pacific Northwest, I’m going to do some retracing of our steps just to try and experience it once again.
The Random Chili — Early on in our marriage, we whipped up some chili one night by just throwing stuff into a pot (e.g., beef, peppers, random spices, a bottle of beer). The result was an amazing batch of chili that we still talk about to this day. We’ve tried replicating it many times over the years, and though we eventually settled on a chili recipe that’s reliably enjoyable, it’s just not the same as that random batch we made so long ago.
Conroy’s Orange Rolls — I love cinnamon rolls, and the goopier the better. We have a really great family recipe that we use all the time, but if I just wanted to pick up some rolls, then I’d always go to Conroy’s Family Bakery. Their cinnamon rolls were filled with goopy, caramel-y goodness, but to be honest, I actually liked their orange rolls even more. Though just as goopy as their cinnamon counterparts, Conroy’s orange rolls also had the perfect amount of citrus flavor that made them even richer and more indulgent. Unfortunately, Conroy’s permanently closed their doors back in 2019, taking their orange roll recipe with them.
Nostalgia obviously plays a pretty major role in my selections. Which means that there exists the very real and distinct possibility that even if I could rediscover that Washington truck stop or recreate the Garden Cafe’s French Dip, it wouldn’t live up to the dish that exists in my memories.
After all, those memories are more than just the dishes themselves. They’re shaped by everything else that was going on in my life at the time, and more importantly, by the people with whom I shared those moments. When I enjoyed that blackberry pie, I was a newly married husband just starting to figure out what life looked like with Renae, and when I wolfed down that French Dip, I was with a bunch of college group friends, many of whom I haven’t seen or talked to in 20+ years.
That certainly complicates things, but is also part of the fun and adventure. If nothing else, such memories represent a sort of perfection towards which I can strive in my own cooking, in the hopes of creating new experiences for myself and for others. And if the blackberry pie, French Dip, etc., do turn out to be as good — or even better — than I remember? Then I’ll just be thankful for a little added bit of grace in my life.