The taste of a madeleine did it for Proust. That wouldn’t work for me. I grew up in a suburb of Houston, where they didn’t know jack about madeleines. I have my own gustatory trigger, but it lacks Parisian ooh-la-la.
Rice Krispies Treats do it for me. Real Rice Krispies Treats, not those musty, spongy, gummy, pasty beige rubber squares stuffed into nitrogen-injected foil packets that defy time and decay. Real Rice Krispies Treats have shelf lives measured in hours. They’re as ephemeral as mayflies. From the moment they’re cool enough to cut into squares, Rice Krispies Treats dance merrily while the clock ticks. Sogginess sets in presently and that’s that.
Rice Krispies Treats consist of sugar plus a few afterthoughts. Rice Krispies themselves are made out of rice, sugar, salt, and malt flavoring. The fine folks at Kellogg’s drench them in a cocktail of vitamins. That’s a good idea, since unenhanced Rice Krispies are about as nutritious as peppermints. Rice Krispies Treats are bound together with a paste of marshmallows and butter melted together. Marshmallows are mostly sugar and cornstarch, all whipped up and kept puffy with a lattice of chemicals. Butter comes from cows, unless it’s margarine, in which case it comes from refineries.
When preparing Rice Krispies Treats, use real unsalted butter, and make sure that the marshmallows are completely melted; they become a yellow-ish goo. It is a crime to dip Rice Krispies Treats in chocolate.
Rice Krispies Treats stand for everything that is un-California Cuisine. They’re artificial as all get out, monuments of industrial American know-how back in the Baby Boomer days when men were men and drove finned gas guzzlers and women presented fruit baskets to new neighbors and everybody smoked Camels and Viceroys and Pall Malls and nobody gave a shit about migrant farm workers or banana slugs. Rice Krispies Treats go great with Jello and Dream Whip and Cheez Whiz and Swanson’s TV dinners. They’re perfect accouterments to My Three Sons on the family room Philco. They inhabit a space of Brylcream and white shirts and black ties, of permanent waves and hair spray and high heels, of treeless suburbs and Reader’s Digest and The Book of the Month Club, of frozen orange juice concentrate and Lipton’s Onion Soup Mix and Betty Crocker Potatoes au Gratin, of Zeniths and Heathkits and Thunderbirds, of Ed Sullivan and Hoss Cartwright and Dick Van Dyke and Cinerama, of Alan Shepard and John Glenn and Cape Canaveral and Walter Cronkite, of Ike and JFK and RFK and LBJ.
Thickly green and steamy hot: a playground, but wooded rather than cement. Overcast. Kids everywhere, including me. A towering, menacing rectangular slatted-wood thing that dripped water constantly—only in retrospect identifiable as a swamp cooler. Recess at a daycare or pre-school somewhere in Houston: what was I, three? Four? It’s hardly a memory at all, just a few seconds of a soundless image. But it has a taste: a fresh Rice Krispies Treat.