Jack Daniel’s Sauce

Instructions

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   Mix butter, sugar and cream in top of double boiler. Cook over simmering water until sugar dissolves and mixture is hot. Whisk in egg and continue cooking until sauce thickens slightly. Stir in Bourbon. To serve, slice pudding, pour sauce over it and garnish with berries in season.

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   The Nose Remembers When A warm spring day at the the Inn makes me restless. I’ve been storing energy all Winter and need to get out and go somewhere. I start to think of foreign trips to take. With all the Spring planting and general clean-up-after-winter work to be done that isn’t usually possible. So instead, when I want a day off, I take my nose for a walk. I cut fresh grass, toss hay in the barn, smell the freesias, dig in the newly-exposed moist earth, or rub my face in the warm fur of a cat. Like a detective or a bloodhound on a hunt, I’m scenting out smells to stimulate me because I know that every odor that comes accidentally or intentionally to my nose will instantly whisk me away to times and places in memory more quickly than a jet could carry me to an exotic locale. It’s a vacation in recall that I can return to and from without jetlag and come back refreshed every time. It’s no wonder our noses are right in the middle of our faces, up front and sticking out where we can poke it into things. Neuroanatomists tell us that is it’s a very short distance from the receptor cells in the nose to the target cells in the brain, to those bumpy brows and frontal lobes that we worked so hard through the millennia to develop. By contrast, your fingers are a long way from your brain. If your nose was any closer to the brain, it would be your brain. (And maybe in some ways it is.) The fact that your nose has this enviable “local call” connection gives the environment an opportunity to wage an upfront and personal attack on our brains, especially on our memories, through our senses. Smells evoke emotionally charged memories as pungently as an electrical probe surgically applied directly to your grey cells would. (Don’t try is at at home!) The other senses are not so directly and uncompromisingly connected to the memory banks. Pinch your arm and you’re unlikely to immediately be transported to another time and place where you experienced a similar pinching sensation. Look at water cascading over rocks in a garden. Does it make you recall standing at the foot of a waterfall in the forest? You may know the memory is there and with some mental effort, connect the two but rarely does sight or touch trigger memory of such sensational, fully

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   kinesthetic experiences. Television and the movies do everything they can to involve us emotionally by capitalizing on every nuance of our sight and sound senses. They even go so far as to wrap it around us like a cocoon in “virtual reality” games. If anyone ever figures out a way to incorporate smell into the movie-going experience, (the way cologne manufacturers have with magazine inserts), box office sales will go through the roof. They will have our heartstrings. We have inside us albums of memories just waiting to be opened by smell. The fragrance of fresh cut grass can immediately flood your being with sensation memories, of childhood, of Summer, the heat of sun, the cool of dew. You are magically two feet shorter and engrossed in an inner world of olfactory holograms. Another time, the ephemeral whiff of a familiar cologne instantaneously conjures up the face of a long ago lover, the warmth of a body pressed against you in embrace, or the quiet tranquility of langorous time alone. And on and on through the fragrant canyons of our memories. Smell can trigger paroxisms of emotions, veritable avalanches of emotion. It’s a good thing that our brains also easily habituate to smells. We consciously smell something only when it is newly introduced. Within seconds the brain turns off its sensitivity and we are no longer aware of it. Sit in a smoke-filled room, or beside with a wet dog, or near food cooking. After a few minutes you won’t be able to smell it. Go outside and breathe different, new air. Return to the room and you will again sense the “new” smell. It’s a protective device our brains evolved to keep us from being overloaded with information. Otherwise we would be walking zombies, adrift in hallucinatory smell-induced reveries. We also know that the sense of taste that we think is centered in our mouths really only detects four qualities: sweet, sour, salty and bitter. The rest of our “taste” is in our noses. It’s the nose that has myriads of specialized receptors to detect the crowded universe of compounds that make up the foods we eat. It’s the nose that saved our animal forebears (from being only three-bears) by differentiating what was edible from what was poisonous. By the time it was in the mouth, it would have been too late. Which explains why you can’t taste Mom’s chicken soup when you have a head cold. The rhino-virus has knocked out the receptor cells.

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   As people age they lose their memories. They also lose their sense of smell. Maybe the memories went with the smell. It’s the nose that remembers when. The best part of my day off nose-walk is returning to the aroma of Michael cooking spring lamb and vegetables, or a fresh-baked rhubarb pie.