Food for Thought – A menu of memories, from Marcel Proust to Melanie Safka

This fact had somehow passed me by until recently. But as I now know, the song Brand New Key – a 2½-minute pop classic from 1971, by Melanie Safka – has a lot in common with Marcel Proust's 4,000-page novel À la recherche du temps perdu.

Both were, at least in part, the result of a flood of childhood memories unleashed by food. In Proust’s case, supposedly (we’ll come back to the details later), it was a madeleine dipped in tea that did the trick. In Melanie’s, more prosaically, it was a McDonald’s meal, albeit eaten in extreme circumstances that must have exacerbated the effect.

As explained years afterwards, she had been on “a 27-day fast with water” (that part was unexplained) immediately beforehand. She had also been a vegetarian. Then she passed a McDonald’s – or rather didn’t pass it. Drawn in by the smell, she “had the whole works – the burger the shake and the fries”. And when she finished eating, the song was miraculously in her head.

“The aroma brought back memories of roller skating and learning to ride a bike and the vision of my dad holding the back fender of the tire,” she recalled. “And me saying to my dad . . . ‘You’re holding, you’re holding, you’re holding, right? Then I’d look back and he wasn’t holding and I’d fall.”

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When the result became a hit, of course, many people assumed that the line “I’ve got a brand new pair of roller-skates, you’ve got a brand new key”, must be sexual innuendo. Freud would have been certain of it.

And there is no other obvious reason why the singer would need a key to unlock her skates (although my roller-blading son says an allen key is sometimes necessary, for tightening wheels). As with all songwriters who deliberately bypass the intellect when composing, Melanie herself may not know the lyrics’s meaning.

In any case, whatever chemical processes that McDonalds' meal set off, it too resulted in a work of art. The product may not have been a Proustian saga, exactly, although when you consider the later Brendan Grace version, where the roller-skates became a "Combine Harvester", which then in turn became a hit for the English scrumpy-and-western outfit The Wurzels, the gap at least narrows.

But belatedly hearing the story behind Melanie’s song (thank you John Creedon) set me reading again about the origins of Proust’s epic. And as I now also realise, the supposed role of the madeleine in that may be a myth.

I had often wondered while eating one of those little shell-shaped cakes how something so bland could be such a powerful trigger of memory. Even allowing that the cakes a childhood Proust might have enjoyed were vastly superior to the ones sold now in supermarkets, it all seemed like an undeserved gift to Big Boulangerie.

But it’s known that in an early draft of his novel, the author used mere toast (with honey) as the catalyst of recall. The madeleine, therefore, was a second thought, at best. And scholars have also found evidence that even though the food incident is used to illustrate the idea of involuntary memory, it may have resulted from a carefully deliberate thought process.

One of Proust's acknowledged influences was Pierre Loti, a writer and naval officer whose semi-autobiographical My Brother Yves (1883) tells the story of his real-life friendship with a hard-drinking Breton sailor.

This includes a scene wherein, one evening, the two descend at low tide into the bed of a salt-water lake in search of “berniques” (limpets) and Yves’s hope of recreating “a feast of his boyhood […] shell-fish eaten raw with bread and butter”. They had the bread and butter ready. They also had a special knife to open the shells. But the experience proved a disappointment. “‘It’s not as good as it used to be,’ said Yves when he had finished eating . . . ‘Let us go, shall we?’”

According to scholars, it may have been this failure to deliberately evoke the past that Proust immortalised in the contrasting rush of memory unlocked by the madeleine. Not only is the pastry shaped like a bernique shell. It has the double significance of evoking the marine depths from which buried memories can suddenly resurface. But if the scholars are right, the madeleine anecdote was a calculated effort to describe something accidental.

So perhaps Melanie’s song was the truer example of the power of food to bring the past to life.

From a nutritionist viewpoint, however, it may have been an even worse precedent. Never mind the 27-day fast, the singer has also admitted that on subsequent occasions she ate in McDonald’s in hopes of repeating the magic, but without success: “That unique combination just never happened again.”