Oh my darling, oh my darling,
Oh my darling, Clementine!
Thou art lost and gone forever
Dreadful sorry, Clementine
Food memories are funny. Don’t you think? How certain smells, tastes or textures stir memories. Recollections that were lost, found, mourned and replaced all because of something you ate.
photo by photodigs
Last week, I bought a “Cuties” box of clementines at my favorite Asian market, it only cost $3.99.
When I was a child, I would visit my Grandmama in Gary, Indiana for the summers. A neat woman back in the day. She would buy candy at Kmart or Wal*Mart or some other “mart” location that sold bags of candy two-for-a-dollar.
Circus Peanuts, Candy Corn, Red Licorice Bits, (not the whole sticks of licorice, just its bits) and especially Orange Slices helped Grandmama give the candy lady down the block a run for her money. It was a cluster of sugar.
If you were lucky, and you managed to get through the day without a whooping, you could fill the fancy ceramic bowls with the candy. Of course, popping a few of the Orange Slices into your mouth was customary.
These days I don’t eat much candy, sugar gives me a horrible headache. I don’t eat a lot of the foods that I grew up with. A lot of the foods that would cause me to remember the ghosts of childhood are hardly eaten. It’s not that I can’t eat them, I just choose not to. It’s a rare occasion that a food I eat now will remind me of being a child.
photo by TAHG
My kids and I sat at the table and peeled away the smooth, glossy exteriors of the clementines. We carefully removed the white pith and placed the sweet, tiny sections into a ceramic bowl and ate them like Orange Slices.
Clementine Slices