Taste: My Life through Food(2)

Today, I also ask the same question when guests cross my threshold and take great joy in mixing up whatever tipple floats their boat. I also make one for myself every evening. What form it might take differs with the seasons and my temperament. Sometimes it’s a Martini, other times a vodka tonic, on occasion a cold sake, a whiskey sour, or a simple scotch on the rocks, and so on and so on. This past year I began a relationship with a Negroni and I am happy to say it’s going very well.

Here’s how I make one.





A Negroni—Up


– SERVES 1 –

50 milliliters gin

25 milliliters Campari

25 milliliters good sweet vermouth

Ice

1 orange slice



Pour all the booze into a cocktail shaker filled with ice.

Shake it well.

Strain it into a coupe.

Garnish with a slice of orange.

Sit down.

Drink it.



The sun is now in your stomach.

(There are those who consider serving this cocktail “straight up” to be an act of spirituous heresy. But they needn’t get so upset. I never planned on inviting them to my home anyway.)





1


I grew up in Katonah, New York, a beautiful town about sixty miles north of Manhattan. We moved there when I was three years of age from Peekskill, New York, a small city with a large Italian population on the Hudson River where my father’s family had settled after emigrating from Calabria. My mother’s family, also from Calabria, lived in neighboring Verplanck, a town composed of mostly Italian and Irish immigrants. My parents, Joan Tropiano and Stanley Tucci the Second, met at a picnic in 1959, and my father proposed a few months later. They married soon afterward and I was born ten months after their wedding day. Clearly they were in a hurry to breed. My sister Gina followed three years later, and my sister Christine three years after that. We lived in a three-bedroom contemporary house at the top of a hill on a cul-de-sac mostly surrounded by woods. My father was the head of the art department at a high school a few towns away, and my mother worked in the office there. My sisters and I went to our local elementary, junior high, and high schools.

In the sixties and seventies, the suburbs of northern Westchester were not nearly as densely populated as they are today and were a rather ideal place to grow up. My sisters and I had a great group of friends who lived on our road and close by with whom we played daily and almost exclusively out of doors. There were no video games or mobile phones, and television was only watched on occasion. Instead we played in each other’s yards or the nearby fields, but mostly in the surrounding woods, throughout the year. The woods had everything to offer us. Endless trees to climb and in which “forts” could be built, swamps to trudge through or skate on when frozen, Revolutionary War–era stone walls to climb, and hills to sled down when they were covered in the deep snow that used to fall consistently every winter.

Now that I am in the autumn of my years (I have just turned sixty, so that might be edging toward mid-to late autumn), I often wish I could return to those times, that place, and my innocent, curious, energetic self. I would also like to go back if only to retrieve my beautiful head of hair.

The carefree activities out of doors in all kinds of weather were a wonderful part of my childhood, but what was even more wonderful was what and how my family cooked and ate.



* * *



Food, its preparation, serving, and ingesting, was the primary activity and the main topic of conversation in my household growing up. My mother insists that she was capable of little more than boiling water when she married my father. If this is true, she has more than made up for this shortcoming over the last half century. I can honestly say that on the four-burner electric stove she used throughout my childhood and on the gas hob that replaced it many years later, she has never cooked a bad meal. Not once. The focus of her cooking is Italian, primarily recipes from her family or my father’s family. (However, she was never afraid to branch out into the cuisine of Northern Italy. Her risotto Milanese is still one of the best I have ever tasted.)

Over the years she also perfected a few dishes from other countries, which became staples of her repertoire. One year paella appeared, cooked and served in an elegant orange and white Dansk casserole dish. Brimming with clams, mussels, shrimp, chicken, and lobster tails (at the time lobster was somewhat affordable), it became a special treat for years to come. Crepes made their way onto our table at some point in the early 1970s, no doubt inspired by Julia Child. Light and airy, they were stuffed with chicken in a béchamel sauce and greedily devoured by us all. Rich, thick chili con carne appeared every now and again, speckled with green and red peppers, its meat made unctuous by rich red tomatoes and olive oil. This dish was often specifically made for some neighbor’s annual Super Bowl party. We never threw any such fête, as no one in the house was in any way a football fan.

It should be obvious by now that when I was young, my mother spent most of her waking time in the kitchen, and she still does to this day. Cooking for her is at once a creative outlet and a way of feeding her family well. Her cooking, like that of any great cook or chef, is proof that culinary creativity may be the most perfect art form. It allows for free personal expression like painting, musical composition, or writing and yet fulfills a most practical need: the need to eat. Edible art. What could be better?