Smell

An essay about cooking and memory.

Hi, Wil here. I hope you’re doing well, eating well, and enjoying autumn.

This is a short essay called Smell. It’s about cooking and memory.

Long-time readers of this newsletter will know how important memoir is to what I share here. This essay is something of an experiment about what kind of memoir my food writing can be. I don’t often send previews to all of you, but if you can support my work here and, among other benefits, get access to my memoir writing in return, then I really hope you’ll upgrade.

Thanks,

The Recovering Line Cook

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There is one kitchen I have never told you about. I haven't told you about it because there are things about the place that might get my former colleagues in trouble were I to share them.

Now it's many years ago, I'm no longer so afraid.

The head chef was a short, round man who, in the months I worked with him, didn’t raise his voice a single time. His smoking habit was also so compulsive that he'd long given up bothering to actually leave the kitchen for a cigarette. He’d just lean over the electric smoker we had at the back near the dish machine and blow his Marlboro Red smoke toward the vent above it.

I've not smoked for a decade, but that short round cook smelled so beautiful to me. The smell of rich, tobacco-smoked skin. And that cologne he wore. A cologne I've known all my life that is, to me, the most beautiful smell I've ever known.

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Now I am going to tell you about my godfather. My godfather, an Irish man called Nick, is the one I want to tell you about.

My earliest memory of Nick is the feeling of his hands at my armpits. I am at school beside a field of boys playing football. One of them is his son. I am waiting for my turn to play, my thighs protected from the severe British winter by tortuously short blue shorts and red socks pulled up to my knees. And then I am five foot in the air. The only hint as to who it is lifting me from behind, which is not a hint at all, really, but proof, is the smell of him. That beautiful smell. My godfather, Nick, smelled better than any person I have ever known. Still know. He was a big man. Tall and strong and dark-haired. The opposite of what I have come to be in manhood. He smelled, to me, of the Platonic form of the masculine. It makes me happy to know he was a good man. A man people liked and loved. I want that smell to be of the kind of man people like and love. I want it to be the smell of a good man.

The last memory I have of Nick is from his wedding day. My younger sister is massaging his thin, pale legs. The window is open in his pale room and pale, early summer light breezes through thin, pale curtains. He is lying in bed, barely dressed. At one point I try to appear comfortable and perch at the end of his bed. By his feet. I notice how much one of his calf muscles twitches and I wonder if that is a symptom of the disease that is killing him.