Pickles and Madeleines: Food and Memory in Salman Rushdie and Marcel Proust

At the end of Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children (1981), the narrator, Saleem Sinai, “pickles time”, storing thirty years of Indian independence in as many jars of pickle, a very hot and strong Indian sauce which will help him to retrieve and preserve his and his nation’s lost time. A comparison between Rushdie’s pickles and Proust’s sweet madeleine is the starting point of this essay. In the West an individual’s lost time can return unexpectedly from the delicate taste of a sweet cookie dipped in tea; in the Indian subcontinent the historical past of a whole ex-colonial collectivity needs strong flavours and to be tasted violently in order for its powerful and unadulterated taste to be savoured – a flavour, this, that might also leave whoever tastes it unsatisfied, literally open-mouthed in shock. In the same way, Rushdie’s use of collective memory is opposed to Proust’s individual intermittences du cœur.