Crazy in the Kitchen (19 page)

During each of these periods, I have purchased cookbooks, special ingredients, special equipment. I have so much kitchen equipment,
so many cookbooks, so many special ingredients that any thief who comes to our house should avoid the jewelry box and head
straight for the cupboards.

I
love
all my cooking equipment. I talk to my appliances. I praise them for jobs well done. And I don't yell at them if something
doesn't go right; I just give them some time off. I don't want to get into a power struggle with my equipment.

I love my kitchen. It's not a gorgeously decorated, high-end, industrial-stove, giant refrigerator, handmade-tile-and-backsplashes
kind of kitchen. It's an ordinary serviceable kitchen, with a small prep area, but it's a cheerful kitchen, and it's right
next to my study, so I can run back and forth all day long, from writing to cooking, from cooking to writing. And I do. My
kitchen is my refuge. My cooking makes my writing possible.

When we travel, we look for equipment and ingredients to lug home from wherever we've been— an authentic mortar and pestle
(from Genoa, very heavy, carried by Ernie); salted capers (from Sicily, bought in Taormina); bottles of tuna (from Liguria,
caught in the waters off Camogli); dried wild marjoram (from the area near San Rocco di Camogli in Liguria); dried wild mushrooms
(from Varese Ligure); peperoncini and sun-dried tomatoes (from Alberobello, bought from an extraordinarily handsome young
man who looks like one of my sons); wild honey and handmade pasta, estate-bottled olive oils and wine, and bottles of aged
balsamic vinegar (from Don Alfonso's in Sant'Agata sui Due Golfi on the Sorrento peninsula). And whenever we visit Liguria,
we always bring back dried wild herbs— marjoram, basil, and oregano (all from the forest on the Portofino peninsula; gathered
and dried by monks).

Sometimes we return with food you're not supposed to bring into the country: fresh wild fennel, scamorza cheese, an amazing
salami made on a farm we visit. With every excellent meal I make using my special ingredients, I drive away the phantom of
my mother's kitchen, try to obliterate the want of my ancestors.

My husband and I don't go out to many restaurants; like many Italians, we prefer to eat at home. But when I order something
in a restaurant, on the rare occasions when we go out, I am in an agony of waiting. I do not make good dinner table conversation.
I am not a chit-chatter. I might be seated next to a Pulitzer Prize winner, and I don't give a shit about whether the book
was hard to write. All I care about is
When will the food come? When will the food come? When will the
fucking food come?

I am not good company in a restaurant. I like to have complete control of my food. Which means cooking what I like just the
way I like it, and serving it attractively, but certainly not in little piles or towers. At home, there's none of this waiting
around for someone to bring you your food.

Restaurants. I don't understand them, don't understand giving a stranger control over what you eat. If my own mother fucked
up my food, why should I trust a stranger?

But in Italy— first in Tuscany, then in Liguria, all over Sicily, and, most recently, in Puglia and Campania— I have learned
to enter restaurants with joyful anticipation; learned to love eating in restaurants; learned to love choosing my food; learned
to trust the chef and the staff; learned to trust the pace of the meal; learned to visit kitchens at the invitation of the
chef with a feeling akin to the intense love you had for someone when you were in high school. (Though I still hate eating
out in the United States.)

Why? Because in Italy, even in small, unprepossessing places, people care about food. Really care. They get teary eyed over
little tomatoes grown close enough to the sea so their flavor intensifies. They caress eggplants the way a mother caresses
a baby's bottom. They sniff melons before they buy them, the way an elegant woman chooses the finest perfume. They care about
food in a way my mother never cared about food. And they want you to care, too. They want to please you, for they know that
food is about pleasure. About appetite, and its satisfaction.

Once, while we are savoring wine and a small meal in an
enoteca
in Chiavari in Liguria, we see the owner at a table in the back, cleaning fresh porcini for the next day's service. He's
doing this while we'reeating our dinner.

On the table is a huge wicker basket containing the porcini. He has his tools— a knife for paring away imperfections, a brush
for cleaning, some immaculate napkins for wiping off the dirt— lined up beside him. He cleans the porcini where we can see
him work, to show the care he takes, to show how it should be done, to show the respect he accords this magnificent fungus,
but also to show the respect he accords his patrons.

For all the time we're there, he scrapes and brushes and cleans and holds each mushroom close to his eyes to examine it. Each
takes a long time to clean, and I watch in fascination, learning the meaning of patience and care. As he works, he smiles.
His work is satisfying, and he's doing it as if there is nothing more important to do in all this world.

At La Cucina di Nonna Nina in San Rocco di Camogli in Liguria, for the first time in my life, I eat
corzetti,
a pasta made with wine, rolled out, cut into circles, then stamped between two pieces of hand-carved wood. At Nonna Nina,
one side of the
corzetti
bears the restaurant's name; the other, the rays of the sun. The indentations and raised surfaces of the pasta introduce
subtle differences in the texture of each bite. Tears come to my eyes as I taste. I am happy. I am in the moment.

The owner's wife notices my pleasure. She introduces herself— Signora Rosalia Dalpian— and she invites me into the kitchen
to meet her husband, the chef, Signore Paolo Dalpian. He shows me the
corzetti
stamp, which has been in his family for generations.

La Cucina di Nonna Nina specializes in traditional dishes made in the old way from heirloom family recipes. Over the years,
my husband and I eat there a score of times. Each time, there is something new to savor; the menu changes with the seasons,
and with available ingredients.

One spring, Signore Dalpian presents a ricotta torte he makes at the beginning of the season when the grass is at its sweetest,
which means that the cheese will be at its sweetest. We travel back the following autumn, and there is no ricotta torte: ricotta
torte is made only in spring, Signore Dalpian says. So we travel back the following spring to have it again. And yes, it's
worth the journey.

In Recco, in Liguria, we eat at Da 6 Vittorio because we want to savor their famed focaccia
col formaggio,
made with Crescenza or Invernizzina cheese made nearby. Only certain restaurants can advertise that they make this specialty;
in Recco, famous for this focaccia, its production is scrutinized and regulated to make sure the approved restaurants serving
it meet stringent standards. It is a huge focaccia, its dough is flaky and extremely thin, its melted cheese tangy and unctuous.
The food writer Fred Plotkin calls it "the most addictive food on the planet." It is served in wedges, one huge focaccia shared
among several diners. After our meal, we talk to the proprietors, the brothers Gianni and Vittorio Bisso, about how the focaccia
is made. Back home, it is something we dream about. And when we return to Liguria, one of our first stops is to this restaurant.

On our second trip, after our meal, we talk to the brothers for over an hour. They remember us from our last visit; they're
glad we've come back. During our conversation, we mention we would like to make our own
corzetti.
So Gianni gets a map, shows us a village— Varese Ligure— in the mountains, where we can buy a stamp for embossing
corzetti.
He takes the time to make sure we understand his directions. We travel there, buy two, make
corzetti
all year long.

On our most recent trip, when we arrive at Da 6 Vittorio, we feel as if we've come home. After our focaccia, we're taken to
see the special ovens; shown a model of the wagon that delivered focaccia through the streets of Recco during the Bisso brothers'
grandfather's time; and on a tour through the restaurant's archive to see photos taken during the World War II bombardment
of Recco, which nearly obliterated the village. The restaurant was one of the few buildings left standing.

In Sicily, in Aci Trezza, north of Catania, at a restaurant overlooking lemon groves and the Ionian Sea, I am eating pasta
ca Nonna
(pasta
alia Norma,
in Italian)— pasta with sauteed eggplant, tomatoes, basil, and ricotta salata. This is the third time in a week we are dining
here, the third time I've had this traditional Sicilian pasta.

The pasta is homemade; it is in the shape of an elongated tube pierced with a very small hole. I want to learn how it is made;
I want to reproduce it back home.

I summon the courage to ask the owner. He obliges me by giving me his recipe for the dough, and telling me the strands are
shaped by wrapping strips of dough around a knitting needle. No special tools are used; just the knitting needle any Sicilian
household would have.

The owner tells me what kind of flour to use. I tell him I doubt I'll be able to find it back home. So he goes into the kitchen
and comes out with a packet for me. And tells me if I can't find it, to write him, he'll send it. He wants me to make this
at home; he's happy I care enough about this food to want to make it myself. When we leave, we say we'll come back the next
time we come to Sicily, and we mean it.

In the Panificio Maccarini in San Rocco in Liguria, I am buying packages of pasta, ones I can't get in the United States—
troffiette,
corzetti,
special small oblongs of lasagna— and, of course, Ligurian olive oil. (In the Milan airport, my husband will complain as
he trundles fifteen pounds of pasta and several liters of olive oil, all too precious to be stowed, from one end of the airport
to the other. But he's used to it. This is the way we always return home: our bags stuffed with delicacies.)

The owner
of the panificio,
Anna Maccarini, notices my excitement. Even though there are many people waiting for her to serve them, she stops and calls
someone from the kitchen to help so she can teach me recipes for what I buy. She teaches me to use the lasagna noodles to
make a recipe that's not baked: you use a low pan, she says, and you layer the pasta with a tomato sauce (with carrot, celery,
and onion, the vegetables removed, macerated, and returned to the sauce). She teaches me her recipe for pesto. I complain
about the basil in the United States.

She asks me what I'll do with the aniseed. I give her my recipe for a bread I make with orange rind, almonds, and ground aniseed,
a family favorite. She writes down the ingredients.

I speak almost no Italian, but from years of living with my grandmother, I can understand everything Anna Maccarini says.
Using gestures, helped along by my husband's meager Italian, we exchange a score of recipes before it's time to leave.

Signora Maccarini comes out from behind the counter. Hugs me. Kisses me. For a moment, though I am in my fifties, I want her
to be my mother. I have found a food friend. A woman I return to each time we visit Liguria.

It is here, in a land that starved my grandparents until they were forced to leave for America, that I truly learn the pleasures
of the Italian table.

Part Four

COMMUNION

COURTSHIP (WITH FOOD)

We— my new boyfriend, Ernie; my mother; my father; my sister; and I (but not my grandmother, who lurks in the kitchen)— are
seated around our dark mahogany dining room table. It is beautifully set, with a hand-crocheted white tablecloth (my grandmother's);
silver-plate (not silver; we don't own any); good glassware (not crystal); and Mikasa china (bought at an outlet store in
South Jersey, the object of a day-long excursion I refused to join).

The china is white, with a fluted edge, decorated with forget-me-nots. My mother is proud of it. She never puts the pieces
in the dishwasher, never permits anyone else to wash it, certainly never allows me to wash it. She suspects that I would drop
a piece because I'm careless or simply to spite her, to destroy something she loves.

I disdain my mother's china, having, during college, acquired a taste for Danish modern stoneware (Danish modern everything),
which I imagine I will buy when I
set
up house. (Because of my disdain, my father gives the Mikasa china to my son Jason the year after her death, knowing how
much he loves the china, knowing how much he has loved my mother. I have come to love the china, not because it's beautiful,
but because it was my mother's, and because, in the years since her death, I have learned to love her.)

I remember the day as warm. All my recollections of my mother's good meals include this warmth, which is, perhaps, my happiness
at being well fed, and not the temperature outside or of the room.

On this day, as my mother brought the dishes to the table, she was smiling. As usual, she didn't want any help from me; she
chased me out of the kitchen though I wanted to help (I wanted to impress Ernie). Now I wish that my mother and I had cooked
this meal together so that we could have shared time in the kitchen, which we never did— a source of grief now; so that I
could have this memory of us cooking together on the occasion when my parents entertained for the first time the young man
who would become my husband.

This was the first time my mother had suggested I bring someone— let alone a boyfriend— home for dinner.

"Why don't you call Ernie and invite him for dinner?" my mother asks. The night before, I had come home from a date later
than I was supposed to, and very disheveled. And, though my mother had waited up for me, she didn't scold me, didn't say a
word.

She wasn't the kind of mother who encouraged my friends to come to our house, to stay for dinner if they happened to be there
at suppetime. She'd look at the clock, look at my friend, say, "Don't you think it's time to go home?"

I worried that, on the day of the dinner, my mother wouldn't be up to cooking, and that I would have to call the whole thing
off. Or that something awful would happen at dinner— my mother would say something to show my new boyfriend I wasn't as nice
as I seemed; she would insist that my grandmother sit at the table and the two of them would start arguing.

She was coquettish, my mother was, as she brought the meal to the table. Smiling at my new boyfriend, carrying a platter aloft
as if it were a holy relic. This was an attitude I had never witnessed in her, this charm, this ebullience, this buoyancy
of spirit. And it was because of this handsome Italian-American young man. He was going to be a doctor, after all, and this
was important to her. She called it "having good prospects."

For the previous two years, since I'd been in college, I had been exasperating my mother by dating boys she considered unsuitable.
(They were; but I didn't want to hear that from my mother.) An aspiring actor (uncertain future; unreliable; saw me several
days in a row, then nothing). The son of a famous and controversial scientist (not good, to be in the public eye, and probably
his father had ignored him). A gorgeous blond charmer ("Beware of charming men," she said, "they always lack substance; people
of character don't have to be charming"). And there was Roy, always Roy, my mad passion from high school, who appeared and
disappeared and reappeared, and I was miserable with him, and miserable without him. (Roy, I never took home; Roy, my mother
knew nothing about).

I would come home from dates with one or another of these boyfriends, reeking of alcohol and sex. My mother was sure that,
before I graduated college, I would ruin my life forever. I would have to get married, have an abortion, give up a child for
adoption. But there was nothing my mother could do to control me; nothing I could do to control myself. I knew that I wouldn't
be happy with any of them. But I wanted to get married. Wanted to leave my house. And so I persuaded myself that I loved each
of them, that marriage to any one of them would solve my problems.

I was sulky, sullen, distant, often drunk, always writing. Writing poems about these boys. About love and loss. About love
and pain. Writing poems about good sex and awful sex. And poems about sex and food, the only poems I wrote that were cheerful.

My poetry, I am sure my mother read, because she always searched my belongings. But I didn't care what she learned about me.
She couldn't be any more condemning of me than she already was. And besides, whatever she found would pay her back for her
violation of my privacy by torturing her.

This one, I'm sure she found. Because, when I suggested we buy cannolis for dessert for that dinner because I knew that Ernie
loved them, and because it would save her time, she said, "No, absolutely not; there will be no cannolis."

In Search of the Ultimate Cannoli Experience

For those of you out there in poetry land

who don't know what a cannoli is

lend an ear for a minute or two

while I describe to you this incredible tasty delight

Brought to you by the same folks

who brought you the meatball

and the pizza pie.

(Better still, take yourself

to anyplace you can find that sells the little buggers

and buy yourself
two
—
one won't do).

Picture

a tube, an edible brown tube,

crispy from having been wrapped around

a metal thing

(that in its off hours could serve as the support system for a limp dick)

and deep fried with sweet cream inside

oozing from an orifice on either side

and the way you eat the little bugger is to hold it

gently in the middle

and put it into your mouth, any other technique simply won't
do
—

it breaks in the presence of too strong a touch

spewing forth its insides

before the mouth can take the inside and the outside inside
itself
—

the ultimate cannoli experience.

It is fellatio, practiced publicly,

perfectly acceptable,

taught to thousands of little Italian girls

in little Italy, in Hoboken, and even in Ridgefield, New Jersey.

Is it any wonder that all grown up

we are

such incredible fucks?

Then Ernie came along.

The meal.

A platter of lobster tails, expertly broiled, a tinge of paprika on the white, burnished flesh: paprika, my mother declared
when my future husband complimented her on their splendid appearance, assisted the browning. (How did she know?)

A platter of double-baked potatoes, a time-consuming effort, involving baking the potatoes, allowing them to cool, scooping
out the flesh, mixing it with salt, pepper, cream, eggs, and freshly grated Parmesan cheese, then stuffing this mixture into
the potato shells, decorating the tops with the tines of a fork, then baking them until a crunchy crust formed on the outside.
(As opposed to the instant mashed potatoes, lumpy, that my mother usually made for supper, and proclaimed were better than
homemade.)

A bowl of Le Sueur tender tiny peas. (A premium brand that my mother never bought before.) With tiny onions, fresh ones, because
she thought the canned ones were inadequate (a new development). As she blanched them, popped off their skins, I ventured
into the kitchen. "Leave me alone; I'm in control here," my mother said. This was something new. My mother had never been
in control before.

For dessert, Indian pudding with vanilla ice cream, a premium brand. Somehow my mother has learned it's Ernie's favorite dessert
and she's made it to please him. He thanks her; she smiles. A girlish, happy smile.

I want to learn how to cook well, though I know that, despite this meal, I will not learn from my mother.

And I do start to cook, and in my mother's kitchen, but not with my mother. With Ernie. Neither of us has cooked before, but
we're eager to try.

We decide to throw a dinner party for two of our friends. We ask to use my mother's kitchen and our family's dining room.
To my surprise, my mother agrees.
(She really wants me to marry this guy,
I think.)

Ernie and I develop our menu from a paperback international cookbook that I buy. I persuade Ernie to make
boeuf en daube,
a dish mentioned in Virginia Woolf s
To the Lighthouse,
which I have read in college. We will also make my mother's double-baked potatoes and tiny peas with onions.

Ernie's mother is no cook, he's said. She serves the same menu every week— veal parmesan on Monday; meat loaf on Tuesday;
sausage and peppers on Wednesday; spaghetti with red sauce on Thursday; fried fish on Friday; pot roast on Saturday; roast
beef on Sunday. Every night, there is a salad of iceberg lettuce with oil and vinegar. Every night there is cherry Jell-O
for dessert.

I tell Ernie the meal my mother made for him isn't what she usually cooks. I am one of those girls who just
love
the food at college, which tells you all you need to know about my mother's cooking— the homemade breakfast buns (coconut,
walnut, both glazed); the lunchtime sloppy Joes; the dinnertime fried fish, served with lemon wedges and tartar sauce.

We are both eager to emigrate from our mothers' kitchens, to enter the world of good food. We vow that when we get married
(though we haven't yet said "to each other"), we will eat magnificent food every night.

Poring over our little cookbook, shopping for food, we find, is more fun than most of our other excursions— to the Hudson
Valley to see the leaves turn in autumn, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to the Modern. Reading recipes excites us. Sexually.
And throughout our marriage the best sex we have is the sex we have after we've cruised our way through three or four cookbooks,
reading aloud recipes that capture our imagination, that we'll soon try. Rustic freeform fruit tarts; blackberry crumble;
Milanese-style scaloppini with peppery greens; baked penne with wild mushroom ragu and ricotta salata; coriander-crusted scallops
in fennel broth. Food as foreplay.

Ernie is a superb, efficient shopper. He memorizes our list, decides to purchase an item without equivocation, isn't sidetracked,
can shop for a meal (or, when we marry, for a week's food) quickly.

I am all indecision—" Should we choose this package of meat or that?" I get distracted by something I see that isn't on our
list, a lovely plump chicken—" Maybe we should make
coq au vin
instead."

A few minutes into our first shopping trip, Ernie develops a strategy for dealing with me in food stores. (It's one of the
reasons my emerging love for him deepens.) He suggests we shop separately and meet near the checkout counter when we're finished.
He suggests I buy whatever I want. He tells me not to worry, he'll take care of what's on the list.

When I meet Ernie, my little basket contains

one can of green peppercorns, because I like the decoration on the can (they are not in our recipe, but never mind)

one bunch of parsley (I have examined each of the score of bunches in the store to find the best)

a few parsnips (they intrigue me; I've never tasted them)

Major Grey's chutney (I want to try a curry)

My progress has been slow because I am excited by what I see. I imagine all the wonderful things I can cook as soon as I have
my own kitchen if I take up cooking in a serious way.

By the time we meet, Ernie has selected everything we need. He looks at what I've chosen, tells me to put back his parsley
while he checks out— mine's better— and takes the little can of green peppercorns and the parsnips and the chutney without
comment, putting them together with his selections. (The parsnips will rot in the vegetable bin of my mother's refrigerator,
but the little can of green peppercorns and the chutney come with me to the apartment Ernie and I move into after our marriage.
I use the peppercorns in a lovely sauteed steak with a green peppercorn cream sauce I make soon after we marry. The chutney,
to accompany a chicken curry with onions and apples.)

My mother abandons her kitchen for the day of our dinner, and she bullies my grandmother into doing the same. She sets the
table for us, then retreats to the TV room.
(She really wants me to marry this
guy.)

For two people who have never wielded a knife, skinned a garlic clove, or peeled or chopped an onion, the amount of preparation
for one meal seems prodigious. But we proceed. Step by step. Magnificently. With one— major— glitch.

Our
boeuf en daube
calls for wine, a lot of wine. Which my father gives us from his supply because we're still too young to buy our own.

We pour the wine into the deep pot that has our beef, onions, carrots, and garlic, all nicely browned and glistening. Stand
over it, looking at the magnificence we are creating, smiling with the glory of it all.

But we are novices; we don't know that wine throws off alcohol as it simmers. If you stand with your head over a pot
of boeuf en daube,
inhaling, for a while, you are going to get drunk. Shitfaced, in fact.

When our company arrives, we're staggering, in no shape to serve them. My mother, uncharacteristically, thinks this is funny.
(She must
really want me to marry this guy.)
And makes excuses for us. My grandmother laughs. " 'Mbriaghi," she says.