The Glad Seed

Nostalgia can be evoked by the smell, sight, or taste of almost anything familiar, but food is definitely a big trigger. Often we like something for no other reason than its familiarity. Take root beer, which I have in my pantry at this moment. Watch reaction videos of non-Americans trying root beer for the first time. Few like it. Most think it tastes like cola gone seriously wrong somehow. It is similar to the reaction of most Americans on their first exposure to kvas, a Russian soft drink that tastes something like liquid carbonated rye bread. It’s weird to newbies, but I fully understand why Russian expatriates get nostalgic about it. So too with other flavors. Childhood memories of home cooking are often the strongest source of food nostalgia.

                                            

In my case the nostalgia is not from home cooking per se – not from my parents’ home anyway. My mother was a remarkable woman of many talents but cooking wasn’t really one of them and she didn’t pretend otherwise. “Like mother used to make” to me means off the shelf and probably from the frozen section: nothing really wrong with it, just generic. (This describes my own present-day cooking, too, by the way.) The memorable home meals from my childhood were memorable for reasons other than culinary. My paternal grandmother on the other hand was a phenomenal cook who always worked from scratch. We’d go to her house on holidays or just the occasional Sunday, and I’m experiencing taste-memories of some of her dishes right now just by writing about them. My grandfather was from Budapest and my grandmother’s family hailed from Bratislava (both Austria-Hungary at the time), so much (by no means all) of the fare on their table was very Central European: things like stuffed cabbages, stuffed peppers, and goulash. Don’t spare the paprika. One of her signature desserts was a poppy seed swirl cake: heavy enough on the poppy seeds for a single slice to make one fail drug tests for a month.

 

Poppy seeds are what brought the whole subject of food nostalgia to mind for today’s post. I get a yen for them occasionally, but nearby markets carry only poppy seed muffins, lemon cake, and bagels. These are fine but don’t stir any childhood memories. There is a Hungarian bakery about 40 minutes from my house that sells baked in-house poppy seed swirl cake, but a 1 ½ hour round trip (including in-store time) is a long way to go just for a cake, so I always talk myself out of it unless in the neighborhood anyway. However, I happened upon an ad for home delivery of Stern’s poppy seed cake a few days ago. I rarely order anything food-related online. Food shopping is just something I prefer to do in person, but on this occasion I decided to make an exception. The cake was delivered by Amazon to my door and I’ve been nibbling at it since this morning. OK, it’s not grandma’s by any means, but it really isn’t bad. It’s close enough to evoke the strong case of food nostalgia that I was after.

Poppies (Papaver somniferum) are among the earliest domesticated crops. Poppy seeds have been found at over 40 Neolithic archaeological sites from Anatolia to France. The oldest sites precede 5000 BCE, and for good reason. The seeds have excellent nutritional value. They are high in fiber, omega-6 fatty acids, zinc, magnesium, and thiamin… and of course the dried sap from the poppy flower pod has its own attraction. It is the source of opium, from which morphine, codeine, and heroin are derived. The ancients across Eurasia were well aware of the sedative and pain relieving qualities of opium. Greek and Roman writers (including Pliny and Galen) describe its narcotic effects. Yet the seeds themselves contain very little of the drug. Even if one were to eat an entire cake like the one pictured at a single sitting, the only high would be from the sugar. This is why poppy seeds are legal in the US even though opium is not.

 

There is just enough related chemistry in the seeds however to give false positives on tests for opiates. This is not just a rumor or some plot device for a Seinfeld episode in which Elaine fails a company drug test. The Mythbusters ran an experiment on the “myth” by eating poppy seeds (a relatively small amount at that) in one episode. They confirmed that they tested positive for opium afterward.

 

Poppy seeds are a versatile ingredient and they turn up in a variety of baked goods. Nearly all of them are good but the swirl roll remains my favorite, no doubt because of my early experience with it. It continues to be popular in Central Europe today: especially (but not limited to) Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. It goes by many names: makowiec, Mohnstrudel, mákos bejgli, et al. But whatever one chooses to call it, I suspect I’ll be ordering another one soon. Maybe next time I’ll have it after stuffed cabbage… but not before a blood or urine test.

                                                                                                                

 

Seinfeld – Elaine fails drug test