Omnivore - Remembrance of cupcakes past

I’m sure you remember from your French literature class that the 3,000 pages of Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past, now often translated as In Search of Lost Time) begin with the author’s savoring of a madeleine, the little shell-shaped, lemony cake you can now find wrapped in cellophane beside the cash register of every Starbucks. It’s the quintessential reminder of the way taste can spontaneously evoke memory.

Me? I’ve got cupcakes. Whenever I see one, I remember Johnny Mackie, who lived across the street from us in Charlotte when I was a kid. He was kind of like Eddie Haskell on “Leave It to Beaver.” He was smarmy and overly polite around the adults but he was at his happiest grossing out the kids in the ’hood by feeding white mice to his pet snake or displaying the praying mantises he raised in his mother’s garden.

One year, at Johnny’s outdoor birthday party, his mother served cupcakes instead of the usual cake. This was a novelty in itself but the cupcakes’ icing went way beyond the pale — to a repulsively bilious green, to be precise, a color that reminded me of dead frogs. It got worse. The icing was dried out. I remember it being almost crisp and then, mixed with saliva, it turned into what I imagined Crisco straight up must taste like.