Taste: My Life through Food(3)

Because of my mother’s culinary prowess, eating at neighbors’ houses as a kid was always a bit of a struggle. The meals were bland or just plain not good. However, my friends were more than happy to spend time at our table. They knew the food at our house was something quite special. The ingredients had been carefully chosen or grown according to the season; each dish had a cultural history and was lovingly made.

It was not only the food itself in which they delighted but the passion with which it was made and presented, as well as the joy our family took in its consumption. The moans of satisfaction that the meal elicited from us were enough to convince one to enjoy the meal even if one wasn’t already. Between moans there was the usual discussion of how and why it was all so delicious. “The best you’ve ever made, Joan,” my father would say about one dish or another every night. We, my two sisters and I, would agree as my mother would mutter something about there not being enough salt or something needing more cooking time, or saying, “It’s a little dry, don’t you think?” and so on.

This discourse was followed by stories of previous meals, imagined ones, or desired preferences for those to come, and before one knew it the meal had ended and little else had been discussed other than food. Politics, luckily, were quite low on the list. No matter what one ate, even if it was just cold cuts and olives from a delicatessen, it was elevated to a new level of flavor in my parents’ home. A college friend once said to me when eating prosciutto, bread, and cheese in my first apartment in New York City, “Stan, how come even though I buy the same stuff from the same store, it tastes better when I’m at your house?”

“You should visit my parents,” was my reply.

In Italian families, nothing is discussed, ruminated on, or joked about as much as food (except death, but I’ll save that subject for another book), and hence there are quite a few food-related expressions that have been passed down through my family over many generations that I continue to use to this day myself.

My father is a voracious eater, and during dinner, while savoring his food (in truth he would be eating it very quickly, as savoring is something neither he nor I practices, although I suppose we are experts in the postprandial savor), my father would inevitably utter the rhetorical question “My God, what does the rest of the world eat?!!!”

To me, given the quality of the food, it was a more than fair question. When he was told that dinner was soon to be served, he would take a sip of his scotch, slam the glass on the butcher-block counter, and loudly pronounce, “Buono! Perche io ho une fame che parla con Dio!”

This translates as…

“Good! Because I have a hunger that speaks with God!”

God has paid little attention, it seems, to truly sating him, as my father’s biblically proportioned hunger returns every evening.

When he was young, my father would, as all children do, ask the question, “Mom, what’s for dinner?”

His very sweet mother (sweet by all accounts, for I didn’t know her well, as I was only seven when she died) would respond with “Cazzi e patate.”

This translates directly as “Dicks and potatoes.” In other words, “Leave me alone,” or “Bugger off,” as the Brits might say. In today’s “PC” climate, a social worker might be brought into a household to oversee parents who spoke to their children this way. One could only hope for a social worker with Italian roots.

When we were young, whenever my sisters or I complained about a certain meal my mother had lovingly made, she would suggest rather tersely that we go see what the neighbors were cooking. And that, as they say, put an end to that. The reason being, as I said, having eaten at many of our neighbors’ homes, we had no desire to revisit their tables. In our home each day of the week, a delicious and well-balanced meal appeared from the kitchen, and no matter how much we might gripe about our personal aversions to broccoli, fish, salad, or pork chops, we knew how lucky we were. Yet, for all of her posturing about insisting we go skulking about the neighborhood to sniff out a better meal when we complained about hers, my mother was very well aware of our individual likes and dislikes and she did her best to make, if not a main dish, then a couple of side dishes every night that satisfied everyone. A typical meal might consist of a bowl of pasta with broccoli, breaded veal cutlets with sautéed zucchine on the side, and a green salad. Within that array of dishes there was something for all of us. My sister Christine loved meat, Gina preferred pasta and vegetables, and I ate basically everything that wasn’t nailed down. The next night’s fare might be chicken alla cacciatore, with a side of rice, sautéed escarole, and cabbage salad, and so on and so on. How my mother turned out these amazing, diverse, healthy meals night after night while having a full-time job is beyond me.

By the time Friday rolled around, the household budget had been stretched to its limit, relegating end-of-the-week meals to simple, inexpensive fare. However, given the innate Italian facility to create something substantial out of practically nothing, we hardly suffered. Fridays were often also the only night when my father would cook, in order to give my mother a much-needed rest. She in turn became the sous-chef, facilitating as necessary. A usual Friday night dinner would be one of a handful of dishes that my father was most comfortable preparing. The simplest and most often prepared was pasta con aglio e olio (pasta with garlic and olive oil).

Here it is: