American English, Italian Chocolate

by Rick Bailey

  Which brings me to chocolate.

  I noticed in a recent headline that Hershey’s is coming out with chocolate spread, not one but three different kinds. One is hazelnut chocolate spread, which, depending on your point of view, is either an homage to Nutella or a rip-off. The news release, published in the LA Times, reports, “[Hershey’s] suggests putting the spreads on anything from graham crackers, strawberries and bananas, to celery, pineapple and pickles.” Good grief. Can Hershey’s take something indescribably wonderful and not ruin it? Pickles? Really?

  The year we skied the Italian Alps, we stayed in a hotel next to the fire station in Courmayeur. This was Nutella country, my wife informed me. All of Italy, it could be said, is Nutella country. But all things are regional in Italy. The Piedmont is Nutella country because it is hazelnut country. Sometime in the 1940s, Alba pastry maker Pietro Ferrero combined hazelnuts and chocolate to make pasta Gianduja, which ultimately became what we know as Nutella today. I hope there is a statue in his honor in the city square.

  Evenings after skiing all day, we walked past the fire station on our way up into town. We would hear commotion inside as four or five firemen, all cooking dinner, all standing in front of a stove with all the burners in use (and probably the ovens), yelled at each other in their dialect, a sort of preprandial foreplay. Once up in town, two or three consecutive nights, we found our way back to a narrow street of shops, where, halfway from the end, there was an open window. From the sidewalk you looked down into a small, warm kitchen. It was a crepe shop. On a board hung next to the window our choices were written, among them Nutella with mascarpone, Nutella with banana, Nutella with Grand Marnier, Nutella with confettura di arance amare and Grand Marnier, or if you really needed a fix, Nutella with Nutella. A late middle-aged gentleman wearing a white T-shirt and white apron cooked crepes for us while we waited in the cold.

  Then we stood at the window, eating them. What if we wanted more?

  Between bites we wondered out loud how anything could possibly taste so good.

  He nodded. “It’s what we do.”

  “I just hope you keep doing it,” my wife said.

  “Well,” he replied with a tired smile, “who’s going to do this when I’m no longer here?” He said his kids didn’t want to make crepes. It was hard to find a young person who would learn the work, then stay with it the way he had. “The little place like this,” he said, “all across Italy is disappearing. We have the supermarket now.”

  I thought of that window and the crepe man’s lament some years later while I was attending a conference in Myrtle Beach. You go to a conference expecting bland, from the hotel room to the morning Danish and anti-coffee to the chicken luncheon. The whole experience has as much gustatory appeal as a grocery store tomato: the color is right, it stays fresh forever, but it’s pretty much devoid of flavor. At least, I thought, we’d find some good local food out there.

  Out there, in town, driving past alligator adventure and putt-putt golf courses and a gazillion T-shirt shops, past beachwear, golfwear, birdwear, and fishwear shops, past Christmas Mouse (open year round!) and Adventure Beach Paintball Park, I realized they had everything, from Fuddruckers to Wendy’s to Godfather Pizza, which felt like another way of saying they had nothing.

  “But what if we want to eat local food?” I was stopped at a gas station.

  Behind her protective sheet of bulletproof glass, the clerk puffed on a filter cigarette and blew smoke back over her shoulder. “Local,” she said, and asked if I meant, like, Ruby Tuesday?

  “But what if we want to eat local food?” I asked at a few more stops.

  Finally, an answer. “You can do that,” a thin gentleman at a liquor store said. “But not here.” His thick steel-gray hair reminded me of the hood of a car. He led me out the door and pointed south, said to drive down the coast to Murrells Inlet along the Salt Marsh Nature Preserve. “You’ll find some shacks down there. Y’all like shrimp and grits?”

  I said yes.

  The truth is, he had me at “preserve.” And “y’all.”

  In her 1984 novel Dreams of Sleep, Josephine Humphreys presents a South in transition. Her narrator ruefully observes, “The new South is Ohio warmed over.” The subdivisions, the chain restaurants, the grocery store with “its long glassy facade papered with ads for Tide, Crisco, and canned corn beef.” This is civilization, the narrator says, “proof of human omnipotence.”

  New South? With apologies to my friends from Akron, I would argue that much of the United States looks like Ohio warmed over. Pull off the freeway (or highway, expressway, thruway, interstate, whatever you call it) in Omaha, Stockton, Portland, Lexington, or Kalamazoo, and you’ll see the same thing. When you pass the Bed Bath and Beyond, you’ll know that Chili’s is not far away.

  It’s all about the mouth: how we speak and, to a lesser extent, what we eat puts us on the map. I think that explains the popularity of “How Y’all.” We don’t want to be from just anywhere. We want to be from somewhere. After I completed the dialect survey and a map appeared on my computer screen with two points in a place I knew as home, I felt a foolish rush of pleasure. The survey knew me.

  Which brings me back to chocolate.

  February 5 is World Nutella Day.

  That seems like a pretty good idea. But is it?

  My wife thinks the Nutella we buy in the United States is not as good as the stuff in Italy. She points to the plastic jar and says that means something. Plus, she’s been buying “designer” Nutella-like spreads over there for a few years now. She knows her stuff. Her discerning palate also tells her that since Nestlé bought Perugina chocolate (in 1984), the Baci (milk chocolate and hazelnut kisses) we buy in the U.S. are inferior to those they sell in Italy. And once again, I trust her instincts. In matters such as these I would trust her with my life.

  Perhaps decline is general, all around the world.

  If so, we should resist.

  I should forego Nutella on February 5 as a matter of principle. I should just say no to the multi-nationalization of food. I have my principles. I should do that. But chief among my principles is the pleasure principle. So no, I will not stay the spoon. I’ll celebrate Nutella day here the way it is celebrated in Ohio, which is to say all across the United States: tasting it, loving it, transported by it, half-wondering where I am.

  Source Acknowledgments

  “Big White Birds” originally appeared as “Duck Love” in Skive Magazine in September 2012.

  “Sick Wild” originally appeared as “On Frogs and the Sixth Extinction” in Storyacious on July 23, 2014.

  “The Man from Glad, Car Crash, Amnesia” is forthcoming in Mulberry Fork Review as “Glad.”

  “Clinical” originally appeared in The Journal of Microliterature on September 29, 2013.

  “Love at First Shite” originally appeared as “Won’t You Sit Down” in Defenestration on March 6, 2013.

  “Feet First” originally appeared in The Yale Journal for Humanities and Medicine on November 15, 2011.

  “For Donna, Ibsen, Pepys, Levitation” originally appeared as “Ghost Stories” in Biostories on December 4, 2013.

  “The Soft Imperative” originally appeared in Thread, Fall 2016.

  “Old Houses, New Residents” originally appeared in Ragazine cc. in the 2013 March–April issue.

  “Chemical Neutral” originally appeared in WritingRaw in December 2011.

  “Pure Corn” originally appeared as “Correct Cake” in The Writer’s Workshop Review on September 30, 2012.

  “Fly” originally appeared in Fear of Monkeys in December 2012.

  “Bridge Failure, Heart Attack, Fava Beans” originally appeared as “Infrastructure” in Drunk Monkeys on December 5, 2014.

  “My Father, Going Deaf” originally appeared as “All Ears” in Cleaver Magazine in March 2014.

  “Flip-Flops and the Leaning Tower of Pisa” originally appeared in Blue Bear Review.

  “Ravioli, Richard III, and a Dea
d Bird” originally appeared as “Page” in Gravel in March 2014.

  “Small Beans” originally appeared as “Beans Squared” in Emptysink Publishing in December 2014.

  “American English, Italian Chocolate” originally appeared as “Mouthy” in Terrain in March 2014.

  About Rick Bailey

  Rick Bailey is a professor emeritus of English at Henry Ford College in Michigan. He is the author or editor of several books on writing, including The Creative Writer’s Craft.