La Valletta

I have been thinking about food and how the experience of eating can anchor you to a place, maybe a place that you are not in or perhaps have never been to. Tonight I cooked Aljotta, a Maltese fish soup. Last Saturday I cooked Shurba Libya, (Libyan soup). I have been to Malta, I haven't been to Libya. Earlier I was surfing the net looking for Maltese recipes and an image of a Cisk Beer jogged my memory and threw me back to being in Valletta, Malta's capital. Cisk is a beer brewed in Malta. I immediately wanted a Cisk and phoned a few places, no one in Brisbane sells it, who wants to drink Maltese lager? It wasn't that I felt like a beer as such but more that I wanted to continue with the connection of memory...to think I could have been sitting under an umbrella staring out over The Great Harbour watching the Mediterranean sparkle and the limestone glow. I am interested in concepts of place and displacement. It is similar to the experience/memory of music and I have heard that smell, being the most immediate of the senses, has the same effect, whereby smell can evoke past experiences. The Aljotta and Pastizzi allowed me to be in two places at once, and to think about where I am and where I would like to go. It also continued my thinking about Relational Aesthetics.