Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family

by Louise DeSalvo

  But no, they decided they wanted a glorious picnic in a bucolic setting overlooking Florence. And that we'd pick up fixings for the picnic in Florence. "By the time we get to Florence," I say, "there'll be no place open to buy food for a picnic."

  "That's ridiculous," my elder son says, not knowing Italian ways.

  "Trust me," I say. "It'll be siesta. Everything'll be closed."

  "I'm absolutely sure," says my newly-graduated-from-business-school son, "that there will be at least one enterprising Florentine who'll keep his store open so we can buy food."

  I say, "Fine."

  So we drive and drive and drive and drive. And go into Florence. And of course can't find a place to buy provisions. Can't find a restaurant. So we go back on the Autostrada to find an autogrill, which we know will be open. And get stuck in a traffic jam from hell that lasts for hours.

  I scream at them. They scream at me. Each of us screams at every other person in the car. They blame me for not sticking to my guns. I blame them for not listening to me. I say "I told you so" more than once. We hate one another; wonder what we're doing on this miserable road; wonder why we've come on this goddamned holiday.

  But in the cars surrounding us, also stuck in traffic, no one is screaming. Mothers are pulling out little treats and snacks for their families and handing them around. Biscotti and bottles for the babies. Panni and Orangina for the grown-ups. These mothers, Italian mothers, understand what happens to Italians when they're hungry. These mothers have come prepared.)

  The drive to Scafati is as awful as I feared. The road we need is accessible, it seems, only by making a U-turn across four lanes of traffic. We get stuck in a traffic jam in Pompeii amidst a gaggle of tour buses. Policemen stop traffic so that tourists following leaders holding umbrellas aloft can cross the road from the parking lot to the ruins.

  Finally, we find the road to Scafati. It looks like Union City. There are rundown stores selling cheap clothing, used auto parts, flimsy baby carriages, ugly furniture. We've driven miles and wasted a day to find a place that looks like the worst of New Jersey, looks like any poor neighborhood there, like the one my grandparents lived in after they came back to the States.

  We expected to find a small road, meandering through farms, with a view of Mount Vesuvius, that will lead us from the ruins of Pompeii, where my father played as a boy, to a little village on a river where he was his happiest. For my father, this place is immutable.

  We stop some old men who wear peaked hats like my father's. We figure we'll have better luck with old men with long memories. We ask them for directions. The old men speak dialect, which I understand. We go where they tell us. Find a church. Find, not a river, but a slimy green stream.

  We climb out of the car, shuffle through garbage to a tiny church. But there are no houses nearby. Just derelict cars.

  We find a woman, tell her what we're looking for, tell her my father once lived here. Hope she'll see us not as intruders, but as people who belong here. She's warm, friendly. Laughs. Says there are many churches in Scafati, many rivers in Scafati, many churches on rivers in Scafati, can't we be more specific? No, we're sorry, we can't. Then I mention the fountain in front of the church.

  Ah yes, she says, then it can be only one church, the church with the fountain near the little river. And gives us directions, which we bungle, so we wind up at the end of a tiny alleyway in the medieval part of town, with me crying, sure we'll never get out. My husband backs up slowly, annoying the people who live here, whose lives we've disrupted.

  Finally, finally, after a few more wrong turns, after stopping a few more people for directions, we find the church. With the fountain. On the river.

  But it's shopping time and there's no place to park

  My husband wants to park illegally. I'm against it. What if we're towed?

  "They don't tow in Italy," he says.

  "They do," I say. It's like we're in third grade.

  "They don't," my husband says. "Trust me." I never trust him when he says to trust him. When he says to trust him, I'm sure he doesn't know what he's talking about. He always thinks things are the way he wants them to be, instead of the way they are.

  He rests his head on the steering wheel, tired of all this. "Just tell me what you want me to do."

  "Leave the goddamned car here," I say, exasperated. Just in case, I take all our documents, write down the license plate.

  We go to the church. There's a wedding. "How nice," I say. "We'll get to see a wedding." I figure if we go into the church, watch the ceremony, see all the flowers, I'll snap out of my foul mood.

  "You hate to go to weddings," my husband says.

  "But this is an Italian wedding."

  So, we go into the church. I tell myself it's the little Baroque church where my grandparents were married, persuade myself that seeing this wedding is deeply meaningful, that it makes up for the restful day I'm missing, makes up for the astonishing pizza I'm missing, even though I realize that this marriage might end up as miserably as my grandparents'.

  But I don't feel any connection to this place, although I have imagined I might. Of course, there is no reason I should feel a connection to a place my family fled because they could not make a life here.

  Mine, the dilemma of all the descendants of immigrants. To want to belong, yet to know that you do not.

  I pull out the little piece of cardboard with my father's drawing. Turn it so that the drawing of the river is aligned with the actual river, so we can figure out where my father lived. Then I remember my father is dyslexic, and wonder whether he's drawn it right, or drawn it backwards.

  We turn right, turn left, go around a construction site. (Villages in Italy are not supposed to have construction sites, not supposed to have ugly modern buildings that look like cell blocks, though they do.) My father has described a little house in the country, with a balcony on a river. This is not the country, and from these back streets I can't see the river. So I figure that we have to go back to the river and work from there.

  We go back to the church. The wedding is over. There is rice all over the piazza. A man, older than my father, sweeps it away.

  We go to the river, to the bridge over the river. I tell my husband we have to find any goddamned house with a balcony on the river, take a picture of it, take it home, tell my father we found his house. How will he know? How can he remember? It's more than eighty years ago, after all.

  So we're standing on the little bridge over the river. But there's no sidewalk on the bridge. And the cars are zooming by. And because the cars are being driven by Italian drivers, Southern Italian drivers, I'm thinking that I'm going to die here, and that it would be very stupid to die here, playing lookout for my husband who's leaning over the railing of the bridge, using the zoom lens of his camera to find something, anything, that he can photograph.

  "Do you see a house with a balcony?" I gasp. I'm choking from the exhaust fumes. I'm going to have an asthma attack.

  "There are lots of houses past the bend in the river," my husband says. "And they all have balconies. Should I take a picture of all of them or just one?"

  "Just one," I say. "If you take them all, he'll never think it's the one he lived in."

  "Which one?" my husband asks.

  "It doesn't matter," I say. I know the place we've been trying to find is one that exists only in my father's mind.

  When we return home, my father and his wife come to dinner at our house. I make a simplified version of tiny potato gnocchi with smoked scamorza cheese, tomato, and basil, a dish from Alfonso Iaccarino's restaurant, where we've eaten.

  The day after we go to Scafati, my husband and I decide that, after what we've been through, we should indulge ourselves. So we go to Don Alfonso's, the Michelin-starred restaurant in Sant'Agata sui Due Golfi.

  It is a splendid meal. As I'm eating it, I think I will never forget it, although now I cannot remember what I ate that day, unless I consult my diary.

  We had the tas
ting menu. There were— I know, for I have written it down— three kinds of bread: spinach; tomato; borage and nettles. A pureed-lentil soup with baby calamari, finished with olive oil infused with mint. Fusilli with a sauce with little chunks of bluefish finished with olive oil infused with basil. Amberjack with fried ginger, anointed with a special kind of salt and tiny Schezuan peppercorns, served with a pea puree. Duck breast with little peach fritters and fried peach slices, raspberry puree, and a sauce made with grapes grown by Don Alfonso, finished with an oil infused with star anise. For desert, a fantasy of espresso, served in a cookie cylinder and accompanied by cookies in the shape of spoons.

  Throughout our meal, I imagine that it is a hundred years before, and that I am dining in a masseria in Puglia, or in a palazzo in Naples, and that all of my grandparents are young, and are standing outside, hungry, their faces pressed to the window. They watch others eat the bounty of their land. They wish they could be given the crust of bread left behind on a bread plate, the piece offish or morsel of meat pushed to the side—" I can't eat any more; I'm too full"— the food other people are wasting, as they are starving.

  Back in New Jersey, we finish our meal. My husband serves cups of espresso, chocolate hazelnut biscotti. My father looks at the pictures of Scafati my husband has taken. A church. A wedding. A river. A house with a balcony on the river.

  "So?" I ask.

  "I remember the river," my father says. "But I'm not sure about the house. It doesn't look the way I remember it."

  "Shit," I think. "He knows." And can't continue with the charade.

  "I'm not sure it's the right house," I say. "There were a few houses with balconies by the river."

  My father puts the picture down. Sips his coffee. He's thoughtful. Tearful.

  "Well, you know," he says, "it was a long time ago. And things do change."

  "Yes," I say, relieved. "They do."

  "But it was beautiful, wasn't it?" my father says. Remembering the clean river where he and his sisters swam. The farms that stretched to the flanks of Mount Vesuvius. The walks on the Via Nova to Pompeii, where he spent the day when he didn't want to go to school. Fishing from the little balcony where his mother cooked their food. His grandmother and her meals in the house by the fountain, and the whole family ranged around the table, complete, eating turkey, eating rabbit, eating pigeon, eating pasta with fresh vegetables. Remembering drinking the watered down wine given to young children in Italy. Remembering what it was like to have so much family around you, and being loved by a grandmother you will never see again, and being taught to pick vegetables by a grandfather you will never see again.

  It was beautiful, wasn't it?

  I want to tell my father that, no, Scafati wasn't beautiful. That it looked like Union City, that the houses looked like cell blocks, looked like the nightmare of ugly housing that has sprung up on the outskirts of the gems of cities everywhere in the South of Italy. And that, except for the church and the square in front of it and the fountain nearby, Scafati was the ugliest place I have ever seen in Italy.

  I want to say that there were derelicts everywhere. And garbage. And rats swimming in the river. That Scafati was the Italy that people talk about when they talk about the problem of the Mezzo­giorno. And that it had changed dramatically, and for the worse, in the eighty years since my father's family abandoned this place to return to America.

  I want to say all these things. But I stop myself. For I have made this journey for him.

  My father is very old now. He can never return to Scafati. Can never find the church with the fountain. Never find where his grandmother lived. Never again see the little house by the river. So he will never learn what has become of this place that he cherishes. Unless I tell him.

  I pick up the picture. Give it to my father. And say, "Yes, it was very beautiful."

  APPETITE

  Once I saw an article in The New York Times about how you could cook a brisket if you packed it in heavy-duty tinfoil and put it on the hottest part of your engine while you took a long ride. Slow cooking, highway style.

  I clipped it, started imagining a nice slow braise of veal with little pearl onions I would sneak into position under the hood of our car without my husband knowing what I was doing. I knew he'd be a spoilsport, that he would say no.

  We were going to visit our gourmet pals in Connecticut. And I thought that cooking something along the way would be such fun. I saw us pulling up the long driveway to their house, saw me popping the hood, pulling out the packet. Opening it. "Surprise, surprise," I'd say. "Here's lunch!"

  And the braise, of course, would be spectacular. The aromas, appetizing. We'd savor this perfect little lunchtime meal outside on their deck beneath the trees. Everything would be perfect.

  But I make the mistake of leaving the article on the kitchen table.

  My husband finds it. "This is where I draw the line," he says. "There will be no slow cooking under the hood of my car. What if something goes wrong with your little scheme?"

  "What if we take my car?" I ask. He ignores me and walks away.

  Now, I am not the kind of woman who can be told what to do, and what not to do. Especially when it comes to food. My husband knows I'll do what I want to do anyway.

  Still, I cave, because I am also the kind of woman who believes that if something can go wrong, it will. I imagine the juices leaking from the packet, the juices burning, smoking. Imagine a smoke screen preventing Ernie from seeing the road. Imagine an accident. Injuries. Ambulances. And the wonderful braise of veal scattered all along the roadway.

  You see, I am obsessed with food. I'm always trying to find some new cooking technique to perfect, always trying to find something new to cook. I read cookbooks the way other people read pornography. And for many of the same reasons.

  I think about food all the time. Once my husband and I go to the Armenian monastery in Venice where Byron studied. After the tour, when the guide asks if we have any questions, I don't ask about Byron, or about whether any of his manuscripts are archived here, or about his study of Armenian— all questions I would have raised ten years before. No. This time, I raise my hand and ask, "Do the monks who live here eat Italian food or Armenian food?"

  My husband is in the front; I'm in the back. He knows it's me asking the question. And he knows, then, just how serious this food thing has become.

  "To the loss of a fine mind," my husband says, lifting his glass of Prosecco as he toasts me during lunch a few hours later. And I have to admit that, yes, earlier in my life I would have pestered the monks to see manuscripts, to see precisely where Byron sat when he studied. But on this trip, whether the monks eat Italian or Armenian seems more important.

  We are eating lunch on the roof on the Danieli, where we eat each day during our stay, watching the boats chaotically crisscrossing the San Marco Basin. That day, we have spaghetti con vongole, with clams as tiny as the nail on your pinky; and roasted vegetables dressed with an unfiltered olive oil. Tomorrow, we'll take the long boat ride to Burano, to find the restaurant in the central piazza where we ate vongole when we were here with our sons in 1989. We want to compare the vongole there with the vongole here. I say the vongole on Burano were better; Ernie says they're better here. Another one of our food fights.

  I can find any restaurant where we've eaten in any place we've visited, no matter how many years have passed since we've been there. (Although I could not find my way without a map to the most important cathedral, ancient site, or museum.)

  Once, driving through a remote village in the south of France, I tell my husband, "We've been here before; we've eaten here; we had a fantastic bowl of mussels here, the best mussels we've ever eaten."

  He tells me I'm crazy, we've never been here before. "A hundred thousand dollars says we have," I say. My husband and I bet like this a lot. The more I bet, the surer I am. Of course, neither of us pays up. But we keep a tally. So far, I'm winning.

  So I tell him to turn right, and left, and right
again, and right again, through an intricate system of one-way streets.

  And there it is, the sweet little restaurant with the outside tables. With the flowers tumbling from the baskets along the railing. I've won my bet.

  But they're closed. We can't have the mussels. Suddenly having those mussels becomes the priority of this holiday. So we come back for lunch the next day, even though we're staying at a hotel a hundred miles away.

  When we're on vacation, a long ride to eat well, or to buy a special ingredient or a piece of kitchen equipment, trumps visiting churches and museums every time. In Liguria, for instance, we can tell you where to buy the very best dried mushrooms, where to eat the very best farinata, where to buy the hand-carved stamps for making corzetti, where to find the best truffle oil, which baker in Camogli makes the best bread, which the best focaccia.

  But we couldn't tell you which palaces you should visit in Genoa, or which church is worth a stop in Portovenere, or whether the maritime museum or the aquarium in Camogli merits a visit.

  In Camogli, we've spent too much time eating at one focacceria and then another; too much time figuring when the focaccia in each is piping hot; too much time sitting at a table at the Primula on the waterfront, savoring the best cappuccino we've ever had. (When we're away, whatever we're having is the best of whatever we're having that we've ever had.)

  Our sons and our grandkids are the same. How could they not be?

  When our sons are on vacation, they call us not to talk about what they've done but to tell us what they've eaten. Jay and Deb talk about the dessert with almonds at Chez Panisse, and how our grandson Steven ate his own dessert and his father's, and how Steven relished the fresh ravioli made with cod. Justin and Lynne describe the Italian restaurant they found in western New Jersey, headed by a woman chef, and tell us we absolutely have to go there.

  Our daily morning conversations begin, "So, what did you have for dinner?" Both Justin and Jason are inventive cooks; both relish a good meal at the end of the day; both prepare wildly inventive meals without cookbooks. Justin: pan-seared tuna with a sauce of sauteed garlic, homemade mayonnaise, and lime juice; Jason: sauteed scallops with orange-ginger sauce on a bed of spinach.