![]() Although he frequently had passed the golden shell-shaped French cookies in patisseries, it was not the sight or taste of the madeleine itself or even the tea, but the sensation, or Baudelairean correspondence, that immediately took him back to those Sunday mornings in Combray with his Aunt Leonie when he was a treasured child and not the world-weary adult he had become. In pursuit of vanished time, he found a transfiguring moment in the taste of a madeleine dipped in a cup of lime flower tea. It was Marcel Proust, however, who irrevocably linked the subjective and often unreliable vagaries of memory with the particularity, sensory modality, and physical presence of food. Literature, moreover, abounds with powerful nostalgic works like Jean Jacques Rousseau's Confessions and Henry David Thoreau's Journal -both motivated by early memories of a purer, more innocent, psychological, as well as physical, place to which there is no possible return except through memory. Known as cuisine de meres, these ancestral cooking ideas perpetuated in their respective provinces fed their souls as well as their bodies. ![]() The four-star chef Fernand Point believed that his mother's cooking was the best kind of cooking, and his disciples Paul Bocuse and Alain Chapel also went back to the simpler foods of the countryside in a movement called nouveau cuisine that captured immediate attention in France and abroad. Almost without exception French chefs, especially when transplanted to America, nostalgically craved the simple soups, daubes, and pot-au-feux of their childhood. While it may be a stretch to imagine their longing for the prelapserian apple after they left the Garden of Eden, it is certainly true that through the years the exiles and emigrants that followed their path from their native land to another country either tried to replicate the foods of their homeland or the taste sensations of their childhoods. In politics, art, music, literature, psychology, and even pop culture, nostalgia is the idiom of exile with, as Boym says, Adam and Eve as prototypes. ![]() In the latter, memory becomes a transformative and a reconstructive power. She also distinguishes nostalgia as either being restorative, as in recovering a lost home, or reflective, as in shaping a certain way of thinking about a particular time and place. She centers her study on the effects of leaving one culture and residing in another, and of exploring cities rich in archaeological layers of memory. The Oxford English Dictionary defines nostalgia as "a form of melancholia caused by prolonged absence from one's home or country severe homesickness." In her remarkable book The Future of Nostalgia, Harvard professor Svetlana Boym says that the word was coined in 1688 by the Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer to identify the homesickness of Swiss soldiers who reacted physically to the hearing of certain folk melodies and the eating of rustic soups while on missions away from home. The elusive word "nostalgia" is formed from two Greek roots: nostos ("return home") and algia ("pain").
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