Culinary memory: Taste experience sensory memory in the culinary columns of Dorota Masłowska and Bogdan Deptuła

The last decades have seen a growing interest in food and cooking and along with it a rise of the a new journalistic genre, the food column. This article focuses on two collections of Polish food columns, or, to be more precise culinary feuilletons, now also available in book form, Literatura od kuchni [Literature from Behind the Scenes] by Bogusław Deptuła and Więcej niż możesz zjeść [More Than You Can Tuck Away] by Dorota Masłowska. They provide the material for a study of two interrelated phenomena, the sensory processing which takes place in the course of the culinary experience, and the retrieval of those experiences from memory, triggered by exposure to certain events or artefacts. Viewed from that perspective, the culinary columns of either writer represent a record of his or her gustatory sensations, which constitute their (auto)biographical pasts. Each of them is made up of two blocks of memories, representing the remote past (childhood) and the past that is still fresh (recent travel experiences). The approach adopted in this study ties in with the methodology of sensory anthropology, especially its taste- and smell-specific subfields, and sensuous geography (most of the sensory reminiscences in Bogusław Deptuła’s and Dorota Masłowska’s culinary feuilletons are rooted in their experience of a particular geographical place).