De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum

I LOVED okra as a kid. KInda weird, right? Loved okra and loathed with every fabric of my being licorice. To this day, early love and early antipathies remain. I still have a hard time stomaching the smell of licorice in almost any guise — arak, anise, you name it. Meanwhile, my refrigerator is right now jammed with the end of summer harvest of fresh okra. The stalks are getting a bit harder and chewier. The colors are a bit less vibrant. But our soul food kitchen still finds things to do with them. Right now, it’s a run of Brunswick stew, whose long slow cooking softens up the end-of-season favorite.

How is it that we are drawn to certain things (people as well as foods) and not to others? I’d say it’s not a question you lose sleep over, except that once I posed this question here, I thought it better to hit the pause on my writing, go to bed, and continue the next day — rather than spend half the night puzzling that out. So here this morning, a not surprising revelation: Even the most cursory research will show that attraction and dislike are functions of experience and chemistry. And, of course, those experiences when we have when we are young have numerous components — associations to how our body reacts, what happens when we pair certain foods with other tastes (salt, acid, fat, heat), links to particular memories, etc.

I wish I could conjure up my earliest, positive associations with okra, truly one of my most favorite foods as a child. So far, I can’t do it. Which is both weird and frustrating, given how often tastes and smells in our soul food kitchen trigger distant memories. I’m pretty sure the connection has to do with mom, who approached cooking as she did creating one of her ceramic creations: free-form creativity. This may have worked with her artwork, but the strategy was mostly doomed in the kitchen. I can remember distinctly 2 things she used to get right every time: french-lace cookies and okra gumbo. And so maybe that’s the secret of the attraction: knowing that with okra gumbo, I was going to eat something really tasty time after time.