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Post by Deleted on Sept 5, 2012 18:41:30 GMT
There's a distinct odor in the air reminiscent of 7 years ago here in NOLA. Sour milk, spoiled food, garbage baking in the hot sun. (Although, I have to applaud NOLA Sanitation Dept,they are making daily sweeps. It's rotten duty cleaning out fridges and freezers of spoiled food from several days without power ).
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Post by Deleted on Nov 21, 2012 16:57:52 GMT
The smell of a roux, and, the anticipation of my husband's annual seafood gumbo for our neighborhood Thanksgiving feast tomorrow. Just one whiff and I'm sent into a veritable Cajun/Polish Pavlov's dog.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 21, 2012 18:13:43 GMT
Oh I am so happy to read that not everybody is enslaved to turkey!
When we were still in Mississippi, after a few years of having to choke down nasty turkey, we generally had a shrimp or crab boil that day. Since my parents were completely antisocial and we had no guests to contend with, we could really do whatever we wanted.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 21, 2012 19:12:30 GMT
Oh, there will be turkey...but...one of the main culinary attractions of the communal dinner will be the local,regional favorites, seafood gumbo being one of the most anticipated. One of the things my husband painstakingly was sure to preserve from our freezer and keep on ice throughout the power outage during Hurricane Isaac was the "stuff' of the roux, "liquid gold" as it were/is, oil,butter mixtures from seafood dishes carefully and lovingly strained into containers that were in the freezer along with some other precious stocks. To hell with the other 'stuff' in there that wasn't immediately consumed.!!
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Post by bixaorellana on Nov 23, 2012 5:37:25 GMT
What a relief! It would have been a sad day in swampville had the jewel in the crown been lost!
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Post by Deleted on Apr 21, 2016 5:48:33 GMT
They were just saying on the radio that one of the most indelible olfactory memories is the smell of the soap used in school restrooms. True. I would imagine that it had something to do with the no-nonsense industrial stench of it being in total contrast to the soap used at home.
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Post by htmb on Apr 21, 2016 23:06:04 GMT
I can believe it. I still recognize that smell.
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Post by bixaorellana on Apr 22, 2016 2:48:43 GMT
I have no memory of that at all!
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Post by chexbres on Apr 22, 2016 18:50:28 GMT
Speaking of industrial products and schools - the Pavlovian response begins for me when I catch a whiff of "industrial cafeteria gravy", which comes from schools, but also from some of the more popular cafes and restaurants in Paris.
But the first thing I remember reacting to was the smell of pumpernickel bread, when I was about 5 and living in Boston. It made me throw up immediately, and I was not even able to think about the smell of it - or even rye bread - until I turned 50 or so. I'll eat it now, but only if there's a thick coating of smoked salmon on top.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 22, 2016 19:09:16 GMT
Oh, I absolutely remember the smell of that putrid gravy which would be found on both 'meat loaf' and 'Salisbury steak' -- two of the items that I detested the most in school. But I ate them anyway because I had been taught to eat what was on my plate. (I would probably do well in prison.) But the smell of that gravy, and the so-called 'meat' of those other two items will always remain a mystery to me. I have never smelled that anywhere else on the planet, nor have I ever found meat that horrible. In retrospect and using personal experience over time, I am pretty sure that it was mostly a mixture of gristle and fat with very little actual meat at all.
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Post by htmb on Apr 22, 2016 19:54:16 GMT
I'd rather go hungry than eat institutional food and have always taken my lunch.
I imagine that stuff had a lot of nutritionally empty fillers in it, too, Kerouac.
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Post by chexbres on Apr 23, 2016 10:11:52 GMT
I guess that's why so many working people in Paris seem to flock to the same places - because they serve exactly the same cheap, industrial cafeteria food they were trained to eat while growing up. What's funny/sad is that most tourists think that because a place is filled with French-speaking business people the food will be absolutely authentic and delicious...it is usually cheap, though.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 31, 2017 17:59:20 GMT
While we were in NY recently I had full reign to go into the "main house" where I was born (occupied ATM by a tenant of 20 years or so) and take away some furniture and other things that were in the house, mainly in the attic and the cellar. Upon entering both the cellar and attic I was immediately overwhelmed by the very same smell of both from my childhood. Musty and other indescribable odors in the attic, damp, mildewyish like odors in the cellar with a faint hint of kerosene and coal from the old coal bins down there. Also, the two old sheds on the property had distinctive odors. None of them were unpleasant in any kind of way, at least, to me. The odor in the attic in particular immediately transported me back to rainy days spent up there playing as a child. Very bittersweet. Even one of the downstairs closets had a distinctive familiar odor.
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Post by Kimby on Nov 1, 2017 2:25:07 GMT
Mothballs?
I brought a few articles of my mothers clothing home with me last year, and they hang in my closet unworn. If I pull them out and shove my nose deep into the fabric, I can still smell the house I grew up in.
Mr. Kimby used to say I smelled like the family home when I returned from solo visits. He hastened to add that he didn’t mean it in a negative way, just that it was a distinctive aroma.
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Post by questa on Nov 1, 2017 12:47:17 GMT
Could Australia be the BBQ..........lol Australia is the smell of a hot day causing all the millions of gum trees to send out their blue haze of eucalyptus vapour. In winter time the prevailing winds blow from the south east, across the Timor Sea to Bali. I have stood in the high mountains in Bali, away from the traffic and street cooking, and smelt the eucalyptus aroma wafting in on the wind.
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Post by mickthecactus on Nov 1, 2017 12:51:47 GMT
I remember being at Kew in one of our rare heatwaves and walking through the Eucayptus area. The scent was incredible but all the trees seemed to be actually glowing in the heat.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 1, 2017 13:44:22 GMT
Mothballs? I brought a few articles of my mothers clothing home with me last year, and they hang in my closet unworn. If I pull them out and shove my nose deep into the fabric, I can still smell the house I grew up in. Mr. Kimby used to say I smelled like the family home when I returned from solo visits. He hastened to add that he didn’t mean it in a negative way, just that it was a distinctive aroma. I didn't go into too many of the closets. There is currently a tenant living in one of the houses so I didn't want to invade her space. The 2 closets I did go in had distinctive odors all their own. One of them off the kitchen had served as a space for outdoor gear, raincoats, boots and the like. It had an earthy odor about it. I know what you mean about shoving your nose into an article of clothing and being able to smell a certain odor recalling my mother. I also have a vintage Gucci purse of my mother's which I use on formal occasions and inside it contains a linen handkerchief which has a distinctive stale perfume odor.(Channel #5).
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 1, 2017 15:14:06 GMT
Turpêntine will always remind me of the fishing piers in the Gulf of Mexico. Also rotten shrimp.
On a completely different note, I had some of my grandmother's items in my closet after her death, and I loved the smell of her eau de cologne (St. Michel amber) on them. And then it faded away.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 15, 2018 15:20:37 GMT
Yesterday while it rained all day I took some time to go digging in a large crawl space where we have stored/shoved all kinds of things.
I found a round vinyl zippered hat case that was my mothers.
I unzipped it and immediately my nostrils were full of odors of my mother.
Difficult to describe. A tad hint of perfume and other unidentifiable smells.
There was a mink hat in there. Amazing that it hadn't disintegrated.
I will take it to a vintage clothing shop here and swap it out for somethings that I will actually wear.
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Post by rikita on Apr 16, 2018 12:00:56 GMT
I have no memory of that at all! me neither.
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Post by Kimby on Apr 16, 2018 21:04:27 GMT
They were just saying on the radio that one of the most indelible olfactory memories is the smell of the soap used in school restrooms. True. I would imagine that it had something to do with the no-nonsense industrial stench of it being in total contrast to the soap used at home. We had metal soap dispensers with a button on a plunger that dispensed a vile-smelling chartreuse liquid soap. I’m sure I’d go off on a grade school reverie if I were to smell it. Another school or gas station soap dispenser with its own distinctive odor was a white boxy housing with a black flattened knob that you twisted to shave sand-colored (and sand-textured) soap off a block concealed within. It was so gritty as to be an unpleasant washing-up, whereas the smelly greenish stuff actually made a nice lather.
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Post by mossie on Apr 17, 2018 10:51:14 GMT
I don't remember having any washing facilities at all in the school bogs. Maybe hygiene was not so important then, must account for me still being alive. I certainly think my generation are not so prone to all the must have allergies and food fads that are so fashionable nowadays, I wonder why? Questa, where are you?
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Post by onlyMark on Apr 17, 2018 14:52:24 GMT
The school toilets were at the other end of the playground. At least the boys ones were. The girls I don't remember. I know there were no sinks in there, just a tap in the corner the caretaker used for swilling them out. I also remember, even at the age of seven or so, trying to get your pee stream over the wall that had a gap at the top, and into the playground. Unfortunately at this age my mother was one of the school dinner ladies and I have no idea how she knew, but one day as I was just achieving my goal, I heard her stern voice shouting my name from the other side of the wall. I got a severely tweaked ear for that.
I also remember about that age the playground became a field further on and it was remarkably flat apart from a depression of six or seven inches near the middle. Maybe it was the centre spot from a previous football pitch. One lad said that when he stood in the depression he went into a comatose state because that was where an alien spacecraft had landed. I asked him to show me and he stood in the spot and closed his eyes. Me, being clever, knew that if you were comatose you couldn't feel pain. So I thumped him on the face. He fell down and started crying. That was the end of the alien spacecraft/comatose thing.
We also had open coal fires for heating in the classrooms. Sit at he front and you got a heat burned red face went you went home. Sit at the back and you still got frostbite. It was the job of the bad lads to fill the coal scuttle up every couple of hours. Guess who usually went home with coal dust all over his clothes.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 17, 2018 15:18:04 GMT
In the small Catholic school that I attended for 3 years, grades 1-8 shared the same building with one room for each grade. Since I was quite small, the boys' restroom seemed quite big and I was amazed how the big boys could stand against the back wall to piss (more or less) into the urinals across the way. Luckily, it doesn't take too long to pee, or we little kids would have had to run under arcs of urine to get to the exit.
Yes, there is definitely olfactory recall attached to that place. God knows what the girls were up to.
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Post by bixaorellana on Apr 17, 2018 15:47:55 GMT
I once worked in a place where the men's room needed repair, meaning that the men had to use the women's restroom. It only took four hours or so for the women's room to acquire an eye-watering piss reek. Thanks, guys.
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Post by mossie on Apr 17, 2018 18:55:04 GMT
In my primary school the toilets were bucket and chuck it, pee I guess went into a soakaway straight from the channel we had to aim at. The girls had a row of buckets each accessed by a door in the back wall. I remember getting into trouble creeping round the back when girls were using them, opening the door and livening them up with stinging nettles. I had forgotten about this when we had a thread about confessing early wrongdoing.
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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 6, 2019 19:52:14 GMT
Today when I was defrosting some shrimp for dinner, I got a strong whiff from the past. We used to go fishing off various piers in the Gulf of Mexico and the bait we used was jumbo prawns (in those days, jumbo prawns were considered not suitable for human consumption and were sold only as fish bait . Anyway, I rediscovered the aroma of opening the package of shrimp on a sunny day and getting ready to bait my hook. I ate the prawns anyway.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 31, 2019 18:18:22 GMT
I have been thinking about my grandparents' cellar in Lorraine. Even though the house itself dated from something like 1910, a trip to the cellar felt 100 years older -- worn stone steps that one would not expect to wear down so much in just 50 or 60 years. The floor was packed earth, so there was already that odour, but there were big bins full of potatoes and carrots and onions and apples which would last most of the winter. There were also the racks of wine bottles along two of the walls helping to maintain an aroma of dust and a little mould, as well as all of the canning jars full of peas and beans and pickles, not to mention all of the fruit preserves. And there was also the little cheese cage hanging at the bottom of the stairs. Even though my grandparents had a refrigerator as soon as the war ended, the cheese was kept in its little cage since the temperature and humidity in the cellar were perfect for conservation. (In the later 1970s after the death of my grandfather, I think that all of the cheese was repatriated to the refrigerator since my grandmother did not really like going down to the cellar twice a day -- those steps were rather dangerous for the elderly.) In any case, the mixture of all of these aromas in the cellar is something that I will never forget.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 2, 2019 13:10:00 GMT
I had forgotten that there was also the odour of the coal bin in the cellar. Like most of the older people in the village, my grandmother had kept the old coal stove in the kitchen, right alongside the modern electric one. In the winter it heated the kitchen and also kept the coffee warm all day, as well as a kettle. Leftovers could also be heated up slowly on it.
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Post by casimira on Jan 24, 2021 14:51:28 GMT
While on a road trip to go hiking in the woods several weeks ago we drove through some very remote areas. Sparsely populated with homes spaced far apart from one another. We saw many folks raking leaves and putting them in piles out on the roadside. Sure enough, I see that they were preparing to burn them. When I saw smoke I asked my friend to slow down the vehicle and open the windows. I wanted to be able to smell the burning leaves which took me back to my childhood when we did the same. It was like magic and immediately transported me back to my youth. There's no other odor that comes close to that of burning leaves.
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