Scents and Sensibility

I don’t remember the first perfume or cologne I ever smelled.  I do remember other odors like roast lamb with crisp bacon, our Christmas trees, diesel fuel from a boat, dried kelp on a beach, the oil from a tangerine when I peeled it, or the dampness of a California rain forest.   

But when it comes to scents that can be purchased, I’m a bit vague.  I do remember how Chanel No. 5 permeated my grandmother’s bathroom.  She had the entire array of No 5.   Products including the talcum powder that no one uses today.  (I once had to explain to a class what talcum powder was so they could understand a scene in a movie.)

There was the occasion when my father gave my mother a bottle of JOY by Jean Patou, probably purchased a Sav-On, and she was quite pleased.  She would adorn her neck and pulse points before she went to church or out to dinner.  But during my teen years she only wore Estee Lauder Youth Dew.  And that is the scent that will forever be linked to her in my memory.   At one of the schools where I worked, an employee also wore Youth Dew.  It was so strong that even ten minutes after she had left the room, it lingered.  I found it slightly off putting that someone else should smell like my mother.

When I entered high school, I started to develop an interest in the world of perfume.  I was intrigued that something should be called eau de toilette and be stronger than cologne.  It was during this time that I started wearing MISS DIOR.  It was also during this period that my olfactory sensations were awakened to the phenomenon of men’s after shaves.

One Christmas when I was shopping at The Broadway on Hollywood Boulevard, I spent far too long sampling the heady smells in the men’s section.  I settled on a bottle of ENGLISH LEATHER to put under the tree for my father. 

My first boyfriend used to douse himself in HIGH KARATE  (or it might have been JADE EAST!) and it wafted across to me during assemblies in the auditorium of John Marshall High School and when he would kiss me each time he dropped me off at my various classrooms. 

When I graduated from high school and started college, I switched from MISS DIOR to the cheaper and more popular scents by DANA.  One day, driving to school, I came off the ramp of the San Fernando Freeway too fast and hit the car in front of me. The driver got out of the car and looked for damage.  There wasn’t any.  All he said to me was  “Aren’t you wearing TABU?” and got back in his car.

Around this time my former Sunday school teacher, Mrs. E, gave me a bottle of FLEUR DE ROCAILLE.    I loved it.  Not only did the name sound French and foreign, it was NOT the kind of perfume you could buy just anywhere.  I finally found a small shop that specialized in European perfume at former The Farmer’s Market.   Recently, I bought a bottle at Duty Free, and, based on the advice of a Frenchwomen, keep it in my refrigerator.  It is the perfume made famous in the Al Pacino movie SCENT OF A WOMAN.

As my college years went on, I switched from MISS DIOR to DIORISSMO and wore it almost exclusively through the 1970’s.  It was my “daytime scent” and FLEUR de ROCAILLE was the “special” one.  My first college roommate introduced me to the name SHALIMAR but it was much better suited to her than to me.

Around this time a new scent was sweeping the vanity tables of America:  JEAN NATE.  A girl named Nora, who sat behind me in my Japanese film class, always wore it, and soon enough, my mother added it to her repertoire of fragrances.

A boyfriend came to visit around Christmas time and, so he would have a gift to open, my grandmother got him a bottle of British Sterling Imperial aftershave.  I haven’t smelled that since the mid 1970’s.  That’s just fine with me.

When I got married in 1979 I was rather relieved to be with a man who had forgone the whole BRUT fad.  In fact, he had forgone the entire aftershave movement.  A few months after our marriage we went to Paris.  We were to stay in the empty apartment of a friend of a friend and went to collect the key.  We were invited to have a glass of wine and I went to use the bathroom. Never have I been so overwhelmed, in a good way, by the fragrance that infused the little room.  I kept it tucked in my memory.   Then, one day years later, I was at Heathrow Airport and found something very similar: Roget & Gallet Vetiver.   Gone was DIORISSIMO and in was VETIVER.  It took a little longer to find the exact scent that I had experienced in that Parisienne restroom.  Almost twenty years.  It was Guerlain Vetiver and I have been wearing it ever since.

One of my last perfume encounters took place at Heathrow Airport.  A woman walked passed me on the concourse and I was immediately taken with the wafting aroma of her perfume.    As fate would have it, we were eventually seated next to each other on the airplane.  Before we took off, I asked her the name of her perfume.  She looked at me oddly, not sure whether I was hitting on her or just a rude American.  She told me:  PARIS by Yves St. Laurent.  I was quite grateful when the flight attendant moved my seat so I could be with my family.

More recently I thought I should kick it up a notch and try something new.  I read a novel where the character claimed that Jo Malone’s “Grapefruit” gave the olfactory impression of youth.  On a whim I bought it.   That evening my husband told me I smelled like his mother.  So much for Jo Malone.

Bygone Foods and Flavors

Foods and flavors, very much like fashion, have trends that come and go.  Some stay forever, like the perennial jeans and t-shirts of the food world.   But other dishes have gone the by the wayside ala hot pants and bell-bottoms.

In the late 1950’s through the early 1970’s no respectable hostess would neglect to put out onion dip made from a powered mix to serve with heavily salted potato chips. (If she was particularly clever in the kitchen, she might even add the mix to hamburger meat on a weeknight).  In those days “sodium counts” were relatively unheard of.

I have not attended one party in the last twenty years where this bygone dip was served.   With it’s passing was the equally popular clam dip.   I must admit that I DID have clam dip about 17 years ago. On the last day of school at University of Hawaii Laboratory School in Honolulu where I was teaching at the time, we had a student potluck party.  I can just picture the scene between a busy working mom and her 12-year-old son as they drove to school that morning.

Kid—Mom, I just remembered I have to bring something for the potluck today.

Mom—Thinking an expletive, but not saying it, she swings the Dodge Caravan into Safeway and says: Stay here; I’ll be right back.

Kid—What’s this?

Mom—Clam dip.  Just take it. Someone will eat it.

And that someone was me. ( I do know that it’s supposed to be “I” but it just sounds so stiff.)

These two former staples have been replaced by the likes of hummus, salsa, guacamole and pita chips.  Their popularity was briefly threatened by the new dip invention called “layered bean dip.”  But in today’s world, this takes too much time, unless one buys it premade in a supermarket.  There was a passing fad of dumping various substances on a block of cream cheese.  I have tasted a jalapeno jelly version and another with canned shrimp and cocktail sauce…but not recently.

Another food coup d’état took place in the early 1980’s.  Most people in Silver Lake bought their Italian dressing as a dried powder, mixed it with oil and vinegar and had a specially made bottle on hand to shake the mixture.  This was the only kind of salad dressing we had at Angus Street.  It was in restaurants that we learned of the likes of blue cheese, Russian and Thousand Island dressings. 

I vividly remember sitting in, ironically, a Mexican restaurant with my family.  After we had ordered salads, my father spun a tale of Roquefort cheese.  According to him, a shepherd had left some cheese in a cave and returned months later quite hungry.  Even though the cheese was moldy, he ate it and, voila, a future salad dressing was created.

But in the 1980’s a new food bully emerged:  balsamic vinegar.  Yes, I know, Europe was using it all along.  But not at Angus Street.  Today, my cupboards hold perhaps four different types of balsamic vinegar and one bottle of fig vinegar.  There is not one packet of dried Italian dressing.   And those shaker bottles have gone to the kitchenware cemetery.

When was it exactly that “noodles” became “pasta”?  Or bread, which in the early days of Silver Lake came in white or brown, became baguettes and chibattas?  When was it that sherbet went out of favor—except in the punch at Mormon weddings—and sorbet took over the throne?  When did canned mandarin oranges and pineapple loose favor?  When did Neapolitan ice cream get lost in the dessert wake of Ben and Jerry and Hagan Daz?  Not that one single of these changes wasn’t for the gastronomical better.

I spent five years during the 1970’s living in Europe.  When I finally moved back to the United States in 1979 I noticed quite a few changes.  I had never heard of such a thing as a Born Again Christian.  Desperate for a teaching job, I applied at a Christian school.  On the application form, it asked for my personal relationship to Jesus.  I wrote down “brother-in-law” and crossed that job off my list.  It was almost as embarrassing as applying to a Christian Scientist School and asking about health benefits.  But I digress.

In the America to which I returned, blacks had names like Jaquwana or La Toya, cocaine was becoming the drug of choice and a few new food selections poked their ways through the crowd.

Until my return, I had never heard of taco salad, mahi mahi or Chinese chicken salad.  The closest we got to this at Angus Street had been packaged, hard shelled tacos made with a powdered mix, halibut and chow mien out of can sprinkled with crunchy, curly topping.   Today halibut is too expensive and the taco salad and Chinese chicken salad are the mainstays of many restaurants.  In the entrée area, dishes like beef stroganoff and Swedish meatballs disappeared.  Dinners of roast beef and fried chicken went by the wayside.   At least at Angus Street.   My mother, always interested in new cooking ideas and recipes, experimented with red snapper, water chestnuts and Sara Lee coffee cakes. Not all at the same time.

  I remember the absolute worst meal I ever cooked for my family.  I was in college and had a free afternoon.  I thought I’d cut my mom some slack and cook dinner.  I set the table with my favorite place mats from Sweden, my Mom’s blue glassware and went out to the back yard and cut some color coordinated Agapanthus for the centerpiece.  Then I started cooking.  I used what was in the fridge.   Red snapper, sour cream and red wine.   Although my family was very polite, it was the most God awful purple meal anyone had ever eaten.  But, at least, it coordinated with the colors of the place settings.

Sometimes I miss the simple foods of Silver Lake in the 1950’s and 60’s.   I have not had a bologna and onion sandwich with mayonnaise since childhood.  Nor have I have “weenies”, as, much to my embarrassment, my mother called them.  I did buy some a few months ago when my grandson visited.  I sampled a few bites and though they tasted good, the gristle reminded me why I no longer ate them. 

I would love a good beef Stroganoff and plan to make one soon.  My mother’s recipe is about as far from Russia as Honolulu, but it’s the best one I know.