You could smell Nan's house from the front gate. Not in a bad way. In the way that meant something was already in the oven and had been since before you woke up, and that the day was going to be long and slow and full of food. Sunday at Nan's had a smell, and it started at the letterbox and got stronger with every step up the path.
The screen door had its own sound, that spring-loaded slap that told the whole house you had arrived. And then the wall of it hit you. Warm sugar and butter. Something roasting for later. The particular sweetness of a cake going golden, the top just starting to crack. Nan was always at the sink or the bench, tea towel over one shoulder, and she would turn around like she was surprised to see you even though she had been waiting all morning.
The kitchen was small and it was the centre of everything. A laminate table with chairs that did not match. The good biscuits in a tin that had not held biscuits matching the label for about thirty years. A radio on low. There was always a job for you, stirring something or greasing a tin or being told to get out from underfoot, which was its own kind of welcome.
Out the back, past the screen door, the Japanese honeysuckle had taken over the fence years ago and nobody minded. On a warm Sunday it came through the kitchen window and met the baking halfway, sweet on sweet, garden and oven in the same breath. That is a smell you do not build on purpose. It just happens, over years, in a house that is properly lived in.
Everything got offered to you the second you sat down. Have you eaten. Are you sure. Just a little bit then. There was no winning and you were not meant to win. The cake came out to cool on the rack by the window and you were told, firmly, not to touch it, which of course made the not-touching almost unbearable. You could smell it the whole time. That was worse and better than eating it.
- A tin that lied about its contents
- A tea towel over one shoulder
- A cake cooling by the window, hands off
- More food than any one family could eat
You did not know then that you were storing it. You thought it was just Sunday, just Nan, just the same thing it always was. It is only later, when the kitchen is someone else's and the tin is who knows where, that you understand what that smell was. It was being looked after. It was somewhere you did not have to be anything except hungry and young and hers.
What was always cooling on the rack when you walked in?
And were you allowed to touch it? Be honest.The biscuit tin never had biscuits in it. It had sewing things. Every single house.
The heart of that kitchen was the warm-sugar smell of something baking. Vanilla Caramel gets close: caramel and vanilla over coconut and tonka bean, round and warm and unmistakably a kitchen scent. Put a cube on the warmer on a slow morning and it does a fair impression of a cake you are not allowed to touch yet.
