Rissóis de Camarāo – A Mozambican Madeleine de Proust
Last summer I returned to a place from my childhood; a remote beach three hours north of Maputo, Mozambique. On one of the first nights, we had a huge spread of food on the counter. We had just finished shallow frying some shrimp beignets, Rissóis de Camarāo, and as I took my first bite, I was immediately transported. It was like this crunchy beige seafood was saying “hey, you know me” and I was a child again for a second. You see, I hadn’t really eaten a Rissóis de Camarão since we had left Mozambique 15 years earlier.
As I described this split second experience to my father, he simply said: “Bah oui, c’est une madeleine de Proust”. Yet another French expression that had escaped me all these years. It refers to a passage in a Marcel Proust novel, Du côté de chez Swann, in which a man is transported through time by the taste of, you’ve guessed it, a madeleine biscuit.
Wanting to dig into this feeling, I went looking for the original wording.
“Mais, quand d’un passé ancien rien ne subsiste, après la mort des êtres, après la destruction des choses, seules, plus frêles mais plus vivaces, plus immatérielles, plus persistantes, plus fidèles, l’odeur et la saveur restent encore longtemps, comme des âmes, à se rappeler, à attendre, à espérer, sur la ruine de tout le reste, à porter sans fléchir, sur leur gouttelette presque impalpable, l’édifice immense du souvenir.”
Translated to english:
“But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after everyone has passed, after all things have been broken and scattered, it is taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, which remain poised for a while, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”
The translation is a little clumsy, English being less tolerant of long descriptive tirades, but I can’t seem to forget these words, nor can I help looking for Proustien madeleines.
I had never experienced such a visceral memory. This relatively mundane experience felt like time travel and I find the experience mind boggling. Like riding a bike or playing the piano, our bodies are incredible biological servers.
But you could feed all my data to an AI, and it would never predict or highlight the significance of Rissoís de Camarão. Munching on madeleines, I’ve been musing on the distinction between information and knowledge – what’s the difference? It seems to me that knowledge is lived information. Information makes up the data points of my senses as I go about my life, but knowledge is what comes from the sentient experience of actually living it. Experience itself is a black box – a strange and unfathomable amalgamation of memories, genetics, history, trauma, culture, and all kinds of other imprints. Proust’s ‘vast structure of recollection’. I’m glad it’s not explainable, and I’m looking forward to triggering it again by the simple smell of a childhood dish.
