Hello. I am having a calm evening listening to The Nutcracker score (Royal Philharmonic’s recording) and deciding which Christmas cookies I am going to make in a baking frenzy over the next week or so, and I thought I would share this essay I wrote last year that I didn’t do anything with. I am not sure I got it be to exactly what I wanted it to be, and it is a bit overly sentimental for my taste. But also, maybe that is the point.
I hope you are having a good week.
Remembering demands a medium. Photographs, tapestries, letters, diaries, and monuments preserve singular moments in time, the sight of which instigates the memories they wish to capture. But other memories arise unbidden, provoked by a particular stimulus, perhaps a particular taste and texture. Perhaps something sweet.
It was the spongy madeleines—small, shell-shaped cakes that likely originated in 18th century France—that transported the narrator of Marcel Proust’s seven-volume Remembrance of Things Past instantly back to his childhood in Combray. Startled by the sensation, the taste of the sponge, dipped into a cup of lime flower tea, immediately brings him back to a Sunday morning with his aunt, an old grey house that opens to a garden, and the paths he walked to complete his errands. Their taste and smell alone carry that transportive power, while “their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent.”
Proust’s madeleine—first presented to the public in 1913—has become a cultural shorthand referring to the act of involuntary memory. And while the French author may have been the first to capture this experience, the “madeleine moment” is quite universal. It’s also scientifically verified: A study by professors at Lancaster University in the U.K. published in the journal Human-Computer Interaction in 2023 found that flavor-based memory cues allowed older adults to time travel in a sense. “Just suddenly I was back,” said one participant, of a taste that sparked his memory of a moment 25 years prior. Other studies that have attempted to process the science behind Proust’s own transportive moment have linked the amygdala—the part of the brain responsible for processing emotion—with olfactory sensations.
That there might be some biological precedent for humans to pass down a family cookie recipe is not without note. But when it comes down to nature versus nurture, those who err on the latter side can also make a simple argument: We share our recipes to create links to the past, to reach back and forward to generations with whom we will never inhabit the earth.
The earliest version of Christmas cookies appeared in Europe in the Medieval era. The court of Queen Elizabeth I gets credit for the first gingerbread man, as she presented guests with cookie-fied versions of themselves. The chocolate chip cookie was famously invented in 1938 by Ruth Graves Wakefield, proprietress of the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts; contrary to oft-spouted lore, she developed the recipe intentionally, not by some chocolate-mixing miscalculation. And in countless households around the world, families have invented, reinvented, and replicated their cookie recipes that become inextricably linked with memories of crinkled wrapping paper, the laughter of loved ones, and the thousands of tiny bulbs that adorn trees, garlands, and, sometimes, it seems, the whole world in beatific light.
It seems no coincidence then that, as we live more of our lives online, that the thing tech monoliths track to understand our behaviors, wants, desires, and histories bears the same name: cookie.
But the thing about memory is that it’s often imperfect; we forget and revisit the past and find things shifted ever so slightly, and somehow, we struggle to recreate the thing that promises to take us back. To bake cookies that mirror, perfectly, the ones that mom used to make can be a feat of untold proportions. But conquering that trial to return to childhood—if only for a moment—may be worth it.
We cannot travel through time, literally speaking. But we are inclined to want to visit the past; days long gone often take on a sweeter taste in our reimagining. This kind of fantasy can help us cope with the relative darkness of the present; why, in The Nutcracker, the magical place that Clara transports to with her prince is known as the Land of Sweets.
The now-famous Christmastime ballet, based on a story by the German writer E. T. A. Hoffman and adapted by the French writer Alexandre Dumas, stands on a foundation of tragedy. Some sources claim its choreographer, French-born Marius Petipa, often hailed as the father of classical ballet, did not finish the production alone, as he was stricken with grief by the death of his 15-year-old daughter, Evgenia, in 1892, the year the ballet premiered at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Russia.
The ballet’s composer, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, experienced a tragedy of his own, receiving news that his beloved little sister, Alexandra, died in 1891, just before he began writing his score. Some attribute this fact as the reason for the ballet’s bittersweet composition, particularly its grand pas de deux; some records also suggest that the composer kept his late sister in mind when regarding the ballet’s lead character, Clara. The story, after all, is not all that unlike a journey to an afterlife, a more-perfect paradise where marzipans and candy canes dance. After battling a rat king, Clara and her Nutcracker prince, who magically transforms into a human, travel through a snow-laden forest and past a gathering of angels who open the ballet’s second act. Then, in the domain of the Sugar Plum Fairy, they behold a procession of performances, culminating in that famous pas de deux with the rulers of the kingdom.
Some versions show Clara growing up before her journey to the Land of Sweets—trading her flats for pointe shoes—and some early productions cast Clara and the Nutcracker in the roles of the Sugar Plum and her cavalier. While the original production ends in the Land of Sweets, with Clara remaining in its dreamlike splendor, as cultural historian Gavin Plumley notes, most modern versions show Clara leaving the fantasy land on her own, making her journey back to the real world. This resurrection is a moment driven by a final waltz and punctuated by a surge of horns. Year after year, as ballet companies around the world perform the time-honored production, the memories laden in its score and story carry on, whether apparent to audiences or not.
Because memory is, ultimately, a personal treasure—one that is crumbly and sometimes illusory. But we can rely on the expected or unexpected morsel, at a moment’s notice, to take us back, as “the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time,” Proust writes, “like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.” ▲