Keeping the Feast (24 page)

 

 

 

 

J
ulia’s creation story, not surprisingly, also centers on food. Within a few weeks of her birth, John’s postpartum crisis melted away more quickly than I ever would have expected. As summer approached, we could not wait for Peter and Anna’s visit and Julia’s introduction to Trevignano. John, for all his stated fears about reentering fatherhood, was already completely at ease around her and loved to sit with her on his shoulder, singing all the nursery songs he had sung to Peter and Anna when they were small. From her earliest days she visibly relaxed whenever she was nestled between his broad shoulder and slim neck.

About the time that Julia turned four months old, her pediatrician told me that she was ready to be introduced to solid food. In teaching Julia how to eat—which I felt was one of the most fundamental parts of teaching her how to live—I was bent on breaking the mother-daughter eating game my mother had started playing on and off soon after I was born. My mother used to say that when I was three or four I did not like to eat. Family lore says the only two things I gobbled down back then were homemade chicken soup with tiny stars of pastina, and black olives, the latter preferably eaten in tens, a pitted one stuck onto the tip of each finger.

My mother was certain it was her own bad eating habits that had caused her “nerves”; she did not want me to end up like she had: skinny, anxious, depressive. Convinced that food and a healthy appetite were the answer to mental and physical health, she took to feeding me a thick, dark brown viscous “tonic” twice a day for several months, before breakfast and supper. I still remember gagging it down until when I was about five that ugly brown bottle finally disappeared for good. My own healthy appetite and naturally fast metabolism—inherited from both my parents—must have kicked in at about that time, for my mother never felt the need to push food on me again until after I had left home for college.

Once I left, every phone call, every letter my mother ever wrote me, and she wrote unfailingly, hundreds of letters over the years, mentioned food in some guise or other. She would tell me about a dinner party she and my father had thrown, detailing each of the dishes they had made for their guests. She would send me new recipes she had discovered, old recipes I had requested. Many of her phone calls and letters, written in the rounded, Palmer-method hand of her school days, ended with the admonition, “Eat more, and pray.” And every time I returned home—from college, from Texas, from England, from Spain, from Italy, Poland, or Germany—it was always the same: my mother eyeing me slowly from top to bottom, followed by the inevitable judgment, “ Too skinny, you look like hell,” even if I had not lost an ounce since I had last seen her.

From college onward, once I was out of the daily orbit of my mother’s kitchen, pushing food on me became a bad habit she developed, a way to reassert the control over my life that she knew was slipping away. Meal after meal, year after year, in my late teens and early twenties, I declined to play her game. Ours was a tango I most definitely did not want to pass on to my own daughter. Force-feeding might work for geese, I thought, but not for children. I wanted mealtimes without the background music of a mother’s voice, wheedling or insisting, “More? Just a little. A mouthful. Can’t you finish this last bit?”

At the same time, though, I wanted Julia to enjoy her food the way John’s family and mine all did, to like most foods, to enjoy trying new things, to approach a table three times a day with a sense of pleasure. “Don’t smell it, eat it!” was the standard line John’s father would use whenever any of his four boys exhibited the slightest sign of turning picky at table. His mother’s version of that same line, “Food is not meant to be smelled, it’s meant to be eaten,” also warded off potentially finicky behavior. To this day there is almost no food these four brothers don’t enjoy.

Similarly, I wanted to encourage Julia, as my mother had encouraged me, to listen to her stomach, and to think about what it was her body might “need” to eat. I wanted her to understand
wool-eees
and I wanted her to respect them. Both John and I grew up eating the food our parents made for the family as a whole, and neither of us believed that children’s food should be different from adult food; once she got physically old enough to eat anything, I wanted Julia to eat what we ate night after night. I was not about to overturn our eating habits for Julia, nor was I planning a second career of making special meals on demand. I wanted Julia to climb aboard our family’s established food wagon, not hitch our wagon to hers.

I expect every country has its own prescribed method of weaning. Italy, which keeps to its historical food traditions perhaps more than most developed nations, certainly had a straightforward, step-by-step system for how and when to introduce solid foods to babies, never before four months. I still have the typed single sheet of feeding instructions, titled “The Stages of Weaning,” which the pediatrician gave me as Julia approached that four-month milestone.

The pediatrician suggested mashing a single slice of banana to see whether she was ready to move beyond formula. From her eagerness to eat that first spoonful of banana, given in the warm morning sunshine of our wisteria-covered terrace in Trevignano, it was clear Julia was more than ready. But the doctor warned me that I must never introduce another new food until the baby had eaten the first one—and showed no ill effects from it—three days running. The slow addition of new foods, the doctor said, meant that potential allergies could be quickly pinpointed.

The pediatrician’s instructions started Julia off with plain, unadulterated, raw fresh fruit, grated, mashed, or whipped in a food processor, at four to five months (but never an orange before she was two or three years old). At five months, Julia moved on to simple vegetables, boiled or steamed: carrots, potatoes, zucchini, tomatoes, celery or lettuce, Swiss chard—but never spinach—followed by simple infant cereals made from rice, barley, or wheat.

At five to six months, Julia started on
pappa,
or pap, which begins as vegetable broth, moves on to a thin gruel a few weeks later, then finishes off as a thick mush.
Brodo vegetale
is the first step. One peeled carrot, one peeled potato, and one unpeeled zucchini are put into cold water and boiled until just tender. At first only the broth is offered, once a day in a bottle. Later, with only one new ingredient introduced at a time, so that potential allergic reactions can be easily tracked, other mild vegetables are added to the basic mix. As the days go by, the cooked vegetables are puréed and returned to the broth, thickening it to the point where the baby can be fed the concoction with a spoon. As more time passes, baby cereal is added; later, a teaspoon of extra-virgin olive oil; and later still, at six months, small amounts of beef, veal, turkey, rabbit, or lamb, poached or grilled, then puréed in a blender. Yogurt and mild cheeses, fish, eggs, and cow’s milk follow in the next months, until the baby is considered ready for table food.

Making
brodo vegetale
, fresh every morning and fresh again each evening, kept me firmly anchored in the present, watching and helping Julia explore the world of food. I had started reading to her about the same time I was weaning her, so she was also exploring the world of sounds and pictures and words. It was a time of wonder and exploration for the two of us, and I don’t think I could ever decide which I liked better, feeding her or reading to her, just as my father had read to me every night. I loved satisfying her hunger for food—which so easily translates into a hunger for love—as much as she loved having that hunger sated.

It was a magical period, both for Julia and for me, although after three or four months of making
pappa
twice a day, even my enthusiasm was beginning to flag. Making
pappa
was beginning to feel like a chore, and Julia, too, seemed to be tiring of eating the same thing each day.

Then three of John’s cousins arrived in Rome for a visit. I had made an enormous pot of
zuppa di ceci,
a thick, tasty winter soup of puréed chickpeas, tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, and a handful of finely chopped fresh rosemary. Mary, Elizabeth, and Vivian were seated around our table, with John at one end, me at the other, and Julia in her high chair next to me. As I filled up our big white soup bowls with the thick, orange-colored soup, the rich smell of rosemary and garlic filled the room.

Julia was enjoying the hubbub, attention, and laughter as we settled down to eat. But when I finished serving the soup, she clearly looked deflated that she alone had been denied. I thought about it for a moment, then went to get a smaller white soup bowl from the cabinet, poured a scant ladleful inside, and placed the bowl on her tray. We all dug in happily, and I offered a spoonful to Julia. She looked a bit surprised at first swallow, but then she, too, like the rest of us, was suddenly smiling. She took that first bowl of adult food down in minutes, and I suddenly realized that I had likely made my last batch of
brodo vegetale
that very morning. It was a happy realization, utterly unlike the abrupt end of breast-feeding a few months earlier. I called the pediatrician later in the day to make sure Julia was truly ready to leave baby food behind, and the doctor, listening to my description of the meal, told me she agreed that Julia had been launched successfully. From that point on, she ate what we ate, hungrily, with gusto and pleasure.

Julia tried, over those next days and weeks and months, new food after new food. She ate them, smeared them, rubbed them through her fingers and into her hair. She sang to them, groaned for them, laughed in joy at their arrival. She developed fetishes early on, for days delighting in boiled baby onions, then switching gleefully for a week or two to tiny lumps of soft, ripe mango.

After that we experimented with a taste of mild, fresh
stracchino
cheese, Greek yogurt, a cut-up peach, a slice of ripe avocado, pear juice, veal meatballs, nectarine slices, a few lumps of butter-nut squash, glazed carrot sticks, fresh-squeezed tangerine juice, a whole wheat cracker, polenta with Parmigiano and tomato sauce, Swiss chard, a slice of fresh persimmon, an asparagus spear, risotto. Julia loved
frutti di bosco
—blueberries, raspberries, wild strawberries, and red and black currants served in season at Roman restaurants; grilled sea bass drizzled with olive oil and lemon juice; pasta of any size or shape, with zucchini-garlic sauce, with various tomato sauces, with meaty, brown
ragù alla bolognese,
even with one of our most strongly flavored family favorites, a thick green pasta sauce made with broccoli, garlic, parsley, and anchovy. But to this day Julia’s favorite dish of all remains
spaghetti alle vongole
, that simple pasta prepared with baby clams in the shell, olive oil, white wine, plenty of finely sliced garlic, a handful of chopped parsley, and a hint of hot red pepper.

Julia’s favorite snacks were Roman street food: cut-up watermelon sold in plastic cups on street corners during the hottest months of the year; roast chestnuts sold in the fall;
arancini,
balls of risotto stuffed with a square of mozzarella cheese, rolled in bread crumbs, and quickly fried. Her very favorite was
pizza bianca
, a small square of which was presented to her free of charge any and every day we stopped by our local bakery to buy the crusty, oversized loaves they baked in wood-fired ovens every day but Christmas. As she grew older, Julia learned to love the bakery’s other pizzas:
pizza rossa,
which was
pizza bianca
slathered in tomato sauce; or
pizza con patate,
pizza dough baked with thinly sliced potatoes and rosemary; or
pizza bianca
covered with paper-thin slices of mortadella, the Rolls-Royce version of an open-faced baloney sandwich.

But my favorite memory of Julia’s babyhood is tied up with my father’s eighty-first birthday, which we celebrated the July she was two on the terrace of the lake house at Trevignano Romano. Dear friends who once lived in Rome but who had moved back to Moscow were coming to spend the night with us on their way to their annual visit to Elba.

I had planned a big fishy dinner, not the boiled lobster or the big scampi we might have eaten in Connecticut, but Mediterranean sea bream baked whole with thinly sliced potatoes, very ripe cherry tomatoes, and handfuls of freshly chopped parsley, all dribbled with good, fruity olive oil and seasoned with sea salt and freshly cracked black pepper.

Our friends told me they would take care of the first course, and they arrived in a rush of hugs and kisses with a large bottle of vodka and a plastic tubful of the best black caviar, the kind one could buy at the time only in Moscow, and with the right connections. While Julia played happily with their two girls, Celestine and I toasted slabs of rustic Italian bread, buttered it lightly, then slathered the toast with caviar. We piled those slices of toast on a huge, hot platter and set it on the long wooden table that sat near the giant wisteria vines overlooking the lake.

The adults drank icy vodka, the children drank chilled apple juice, and we all laughed and talked and toasted my father’s health as the sun slowly started to sink behind the house. We drank more vodka and began nibbling the warm, crunchy toast with caviar. I had eaten caviar of that quality only once in my life, more than a decade earlier, while visiting Moscow at New Year’s. For my father, it was a first, and none of us, children included, seemed to be able to get enough of it. I quickly made more toast and refilled the platter.

Julia, sitting in her jump seat and facing her grandfather at the far end of the table, watched our friends’ girls, about five and eight, spread caviar on their last bit of toast. She had already eaten two enormous slabs, barely coming up for air. She looked up from her empty plate and asked, during a momentary lull in the conversation, “Mama, more bread and black jam?”