Primal Therapy

Primal Smells. You know. You get a whiff of something and it takes you back, I mean way back, into your earliest years. Sometimes, you can’t even recall the source of the memory. Sometimes you can. Like the smell of my dad’s cigars — which he smoked inside the house back in the early 60s late in the evening after I had gone to bed and he was free to conduct Jewish Educational Alliance meetings in the livingroom, down the hall from the bedrooms.

The smell of seared mushrooms, like the portobello ones pictured here as a prep step to making mushroom soup or a mushroom cognac cream sauce — I haven’t decided yet — is one of those primal smells that predates my memory. I can’t pinpoint the first time I became aware of it. One of the first dishes I ever learned how to make was a so-called hungarian goulash, picked up at Blue Star sleep-away camp. I was ten at the time. That dish most certainly had seared mushrooms and onions in it. But that wasn’t my earliest encounter. And years later, seared mushrooms became a staple in my omelettes and quiches. But those are my teenage and college years. Way too late.

If I had to bet, the smell of seared mushrooms is probably mashed into my head along with the smells of grilled steak and the aforementioned cigars: earthy, visceral, meaty smells all mingling in the dense atmosphere of our home on Sylvan Drive. It’s an atmosphere redolent with the smells of my first Schwinn bike, the grease I used to condition my first baseball mitt, the burning remnants of our Friday night shabbat candles.

The weird thing about all of this — at least weird to me — is that I’ve always said that the weakest of my 5 senses is my sense of smell. I still believe that to be the case. And yet despite that — or perhaps because of that — I can do a Zoom session into my earliest childhood in the blink of an I.