Within a budding grove

The title given to the English translation of the second volume (published in 1919) of Marcel Proust's great work Swann's Way. The original title was À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, which was thought by the translators to be a little too suggestive at the time. The volume does indeed concern the narrator's sexual awakening but, as with all Proust's writing, it is pervaded by his preoccupation with involuntary memory.

What best reminds us of a person is precisely what we had forgotten (because it was of no importance, and we therefore left it in full possession of its strength). That is why the better part of our memories exist outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again.

One of the comments on my last blip, of the elderflower cordial, was by Arachne (thank you!) who wrote
I gave a bottle of mine once to a Slovak colleague and she promptly burst into tears - she hadn't tasted it since her grandmother made it when she was a child and it made her desperately homesick...
This sounds exactly like Proust's renowned experience of childhood recollection provoked by the taste of a madeleine (cake) soaked in tea.

As it happens, my earliest memory is, I believe, of looking up at a foxglove like the one here, which, because I was very small, towered above me, and the sounds of my mother cutting material and ironing remain very vivid to me but, strangely, in a foodie family, I don't seem to have a strong olfactory or gustatory recollection. I wonder if other people do - I'd be interested to know what it is.

(Thanks to all who put my cordial in the spotlight - most unexpectedly - and I apologize for not keeping abreast of other journals today.)