THEY say that smells can invoke memories more powerfully than any other sensory experience. One day, a few years ago I was walking up Church Street in Hamilton when I passed that little Portuguese caf? by the bus stop.

The smell of kale soup wafted temptingly down the street. I was instantly transported back to when my grandmother lived on Spring Benny Road in Somerset. I was very little when she lived there.

Neighbourhood kids used to ride their motorcycles around this field outside that may have been a garden. My grandmother would stand out there and shake her fist at them, shouting obscenities.

"Go on yah jackie. Go on yah . . ." I learned most of my derogatory words for people by standing out there with her watching the motorcycles fly around the circle.

My mother and sister are fond of telling me the things I remember never happened. "You must have dreamed that," my mother says all the time.

So I don't know, maybe my sweet little ole granny never did yell insults at the neighbourhood boys. Maybe they never rode back and forth outside. Maybe my grandmother never even lived at Spring Benny. If you doubt one memory, you have to doubt everything you ever knew.

Anyway, last winter we decided to bring back the whole Spring Benny experience (or non-experience depending on whether you believe me or not), by making kale soup. We put everything in the pot and things started to cook. I sniffed at it. It mostly smelled like cooking leaves, not at all what I remember.

"It may have been mint I remember," I told my husband. He looked at me doubtfully. I got on the phone and called my mother. "Mom, do you put mint in your kale soup? The soup just isn't smelling like I remember."

"Mint?" she said with surprise. "No, why would you put mint in it? I never heard of that."

When I got off the phone, I shrugged. "She says no to the mint. Maybe it will smell like I remember in a little while."

It never did. It tasted all right, but the smell just wasn't there.

week, we decided to give kale soup a second try. This time I wasn't going to be dissuaded from the mint idea. I went online and sure enough that great king of cookery, Emeril, puts mint in his kale soup, ? a cup.

I checked out other sites. It seems that people are divided on the mint issue. A couple of the sites I went to put ? a cup or a 1/3 of a cup of mint in the soup at the very end and steep it for a minute. Others make no mention of mint at all.

My husband was not sold on the mint idea.

"It's not in the recipe we're using," he said. He's one of those people who follows directions to the letter, and never has any screws left over when he assembles a bookshelf. (The one exception being if his mom does it that way).

When I pointed out the Emeril recipe, he agreed to the mint with the greatest reluctance. Then towards the end, when we were supposed to put it in, he thought he'd dodge it by saying there were already enough vegetables in the soup.

"Sorry no room for your mint," he said with pretended sorrow. Then he said: "All right, but just put a single mint leaf in."

, huh. When his back was turned I threw a single mint leaf in and 13 of his closest friends. After a few minutes I sniffed it. It smelled a little different, but nothing as strong as I remember.

"Yeah, but does it taste like what you remember?" my husband asked.

"To tell you the truth I was four. I think I refused to eat the soup. There were green leaves floating in it. I have no idea what it tasted like. I only remember the smell."

"Oh great," he groaned. "How are we going to know if we did it right then?"

"I don't know," I said in a small voice. "Come to think of it, maybe it wasn't kale soup at all that I remember."