It's summer here in southern China. It's 35 º C and all the windows are open. I can hear the kids from downstairs yelling and laughing and crying. I can hear the click of the mah-jong tiles from the gambling parlour which pretends to be a hairdressers. Just another day.
But mostly I can smell. I can't pinpoint which of the many apartments in the block they come from, but their windows are open too and I can smell that someone is cooking smoked fish (that's easy); another is doing a chicken soup; another a Sichuan dish with chillies and Sichuan peppercorns. Someone else is doing Hunan style duck, also laden with chillies. I don't so much smell those as inhale them. All around me people are coughing and sneezing, but no one minds. Tomorrow they will be cooking the same.
I can smell eggs. I can smell pickling and fermentation. Boiled mutton.
Some one is cooking Mapo Tofu, I think. I can't smell this type of tofu, but the doubanjiang is probably relevant.
Last night one of the neighbours burned their dinner. I was sitting here and jumped up in a panic, thinking I had left something burning. But no. The smell lingered for hours.
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In 1985, the set-up I was then working for moved offices to the top floor of an office block in London’s Leicester Square. I turned up on the Monday morning to find all my files scattered around my new office in cardboard boxes. The phones and computers were yet to be connected. Work was all but impossible.
On the way in, I had picked up a 'coffee' and a bacon sandwich from one of the many stalls around the square. The coffee tasted like mud and I'm sure the bacon had never met a pig. I sat back in my chair to “enjoy” this late breakfast and stared out of the window. All I could see were the rooftops of the buildings to the immediate north.
After day-dreaming for a while, my nose began to twitch. A faint hint of cumin drifted through the window. Or perhaps it was star anise. And Sichuan peppercorns, too. The scent was getting stronger. I began to smell roasting pork – the bacon in my sandwich had no smell. Then, I could smell caramelising honey and duck. The roofs looked the same as they did at 9 am, but the air had changed. It was a symphony of scent and I was sitting at my desk drooling.
It was then that I realised that the roofs I had been staring at were those of London’s Chinatown and I could smell a hundred restaurants preparing for the day
The smells are the same. Mainly 'five spice powder' which is actually rarely used in mainland China. I read so many recipes on the internet which describe themselves as "Chinese" as if adding 5-spice and soy sauce to any random dish makes it in any way Chinese.
Anyway, the Chinatown restaurants were not that great and, on the whole, still aren’t, but by noon I was famished!
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I have no recollection of this, but my mother tells me that when I was kid, would come home from school and announce what was for dinner just because I could smell the ingredients. We had no fridge (it was a long time ago) and everything was fresh. No doubt, my lovely, and now very old, mother is romanticising the past, but I do have food smell memories from childhood. Coconut in any form sends me straight back to the over-sweet crap we ate as kids in Scotland. Confused my taste buds to Hades and back when I hit south-east Asia.
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Once-upon-a-time music didn't come through the air to things beginning with 'i'. Hard to believe, I know. MP meant 'Military Police' no matter if it was 3 or 4. An Apple was only a fruit (or, later, a Beatles' label).
I was an impoverished student and took a summer job working in the local independent record shop. It was the only shop to import strange stuff from that America. We spent weeks only playing Troutmask Replica over the in-shop sound system. Cool, or what?
Next door was a fruit shop. Not a very good one.
We kind of shared a basement, in that there was a connecting door to which we both had keys. Something to do with the fire regulations, I think.
To this day, a zillion days later, I cant look at at a vinyl record without smelling rotten fruit.
The record store was called Hades
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I can't be the only one with strong smell memories. Want to share?
