But it also makes me a fussy, obsessive, extremely inefficient, take-an-hour-to-buy-a-few-items kind of food shopper. This is why shopping takes me so long, leaves me so exhausted, why I can only choose three or four items to my husband's thirty. He finishes our weekly shopping during the time it takes me to pick out a pineapple (surreptitiously pull out a frond and smell it), a pound of Portobello mushrooms (examine the gills on the underside of each), asparagus (check out the base of each stalk, see if it's dried out; check out each tip, see if it's dried out or mashed up or wet or missing); search out purple potatoes, Forbidden rice, truffle oil, faro (an ancient grain I don't know how to prepare, but, I assure myself, I can learn), aged balsamic vinegar. This is why I usually shop alone.
No one in my family wants to shop with me unless they have a lot of time, are in a good mood, or want to have a good laugh at my expense. "Hurry, tie a ribbon around those little jars, double the price," my son Jason quips as we enter a market, pretending he is the store manager. "That little lady's in the store again, and she's coming this way!"
As I approach my sixtieth birthday, I sometimes regret that there are only three meals a day I can prepare. When I say this to some of my friends, they look at me as if I need to be institutionalized, or as if I've become a homemaker, the kind of woman they don't admire. I sit on my sofa, surrounded by cookbooks, making lists of foods I want to cook.
Homemade pumpkin ravioli with crushed amaretti biscuits mixed into the filling.
Sweet potato gnocchi with Gorgonzola sauce.
Pasta with the little veal meatballs I learned how to make in Puglia.
This is my futile way of dealing with the fact that someday I am going to die. Making a bread, stirring a sauce, cutting a frittata into little wedges— the way I have chosen to shake my fist at mortality; the way I remind myself that I am still alive.
My husband once asks me, jokingly: if I had to give up cooking or writing, which would it be? I answer, "Writing, of course," which surprises him. He believes that I am a writer above all things.
But without cooking, there can be no writing. Maybe it's because books take years to write and a pesto is finished in a few minutes, so that if I couldn't make a pesto, the burden of making a book would be too onerous. Maybe it's because the rewards in cooking, if you know your way around the kitchen, are predictable and immediate, and they temper the reality that the rewards of writing are few, infrequent, and unpredictable, so that cooking is a wonderful antidote to the writing life. Cooking gets you out of your head. It's social. It makes you focus on the present. It's sensuous. Whatever the reasons, I know that I couldn't write if I didn't cook.
Though sometimes, it does get out of hand, like when I engage in cooking marathons, and sometimes I wonder what kind of a writer I would be if my writing time weren't interspersed with endless trips to the kitchen to check on something I'm cooking.
The urge to engage in a cooking marathon comes upon me when I least expect it, and usually when I have an enormous number of writing tasks to do— a muddle to clear up in my writing, an article to finish, proofs of a book to correct. At these times, the urge comes upon me to cook something incredibly complicated that will take me the better part of the workday and foreclose the possibility that I will unmuddle the muddle, finish the article, correct the proofs, that I will, in fact, do anything but cook all day.
Although this is very much a when-the-mood-strikes-me kind of thing, a few principles have become apparent over the years.
1. What I decide to cook must require an enormous amount of time and employ a cooking technique I have always wanted to perfect but have not yet mastered.
2. What I decide to cook must require a long list of ingredients and/ or special equipment, and I must have none of the ingredients or equipment, so that I must travel to one or (preferably) several markets and also to Williams-Sonoma.
3. What I decide to cook must require that I use many pots and pans and that I make a gigantic mess, which I am not able to clean before my husband comes home from work.
4. What I decide to cook must require that I use every knife I own, so that my husband, when he walks in the door and sees them all neatly lined up, will say, "I see you've been practicing your knife throwing again."
5. What I decide to cook, when it is cooked, must not yield something that we would, under normal circumstances, really like to eat. In fact, it is essential that what I cook will be an enormous disappointment (the onion, escarole, and anchovy pie, for example; the sformato di melanzane — eggplant mold) and that, the day after, Ernie and I will both admit that it wasn't very good, and I will say that it was a foolish waste of time and vow that I will never make it again.
Like today. I'm supposed to be writing. But I am involved in what has turned into a gigantic baking project even as I've promised myself that I'll finish working on this piece about my father and me. It's not yet noon, but the baking has already gotten completely out of control.
Early this morning, I thought I'd make a simple little Italian bread, an old favorite. I thought it would be nice to fill the house with the smell of bread baking as I was writing about how the smell of bread baking would make the words come more easily.
Then, I thought, Well, why not try a complicated recipe from my new bread cookbook, a fig-walnut bread. I needed the figs, the walnuts, a pan of a size I didn't own. If I'm making one loaf, I reasoned, I might as well make two, and if 1 make two, I might as well make four so I have a few loaves to give away. So here I am, on a writing day, shopping for supplies, then making four loaves of fig-walnut bread, a leavened bread using a biga, an Italian starter, which I keep frozen and can easily defrost.
I cut up all the sticky little figs, which took half an hour and destroyed the edge of my good knife. So I took a little break in the baking (which was supposed to be a little break from the writing) for some knife sharpening.
I sit down at my desk; I want to begin writing a little scene about how I've been going shopping with my father. I also want to write about how I've gone to the cemetery with him because he's been pestering me to see where his parents are buried, where my mother and sister and other grandparents are buried, all crammed in death into one cemetery plot like we were all crammed in life into our tiny tenement apartments. I want to write about how freaked out I get when I see my father's name and birthdate are already carved on the gravestone, and yet how I don't feel any sense of loss while I'm there, how I don't feel very much of anything, though I like that you can see New York City from the gravesite, perhaps even catch a sliver of one of the buildings of Hunter College where I teach.
While I'm at the cemetery, I get pissed off at all the rules— no evergreens, no photos, no plastic flowers— so that there is a totalitarian sameness to all the graves, none of the lively eccentricity I have seen in foreign cemeteries— little strands of beads, locks of hair, braids of palm, gaudy plastic flowers, faded photographs of families adorning the graves. I decide that I will not be buried in a place like this, that I will be burned and have my ashes tossed across the waters of a nature reserve I love in Sag Harbor. I want to write about this dumb obvious insight I get about how we all die and how the dead outnumber the living and how the trees outside my house will be there after I'm dead, and this crazy idea that you shouldn't bring flowers to people's graves, you should bring food to the dead, that you should bring them the kinds of meals they liked to eat in life, that you should feed the dead, that you should have little picnics at their gravesites; and I want to describe how, when my father's not looking, I plant a biscotti my husband's baked (I happen to have it in my bag in case I get hungry) deep into the soil of my family's grave for my mother and sister and grandparents. I want to write about this, even though I know that what I've done is crazy, that feeding the dead is a crazy idea.
And then I remember how, before my mother went into the hospital to die, sick as she was, she cooked meals for my father, packed them in little plastic containers, labeled each with its contents, f
roze them. She cooked a lot; she may not have known that she was dying, but she knew that she would be away for a very long time. I remember how, after my mother died, I called my father and invited him to dinner, but he tells me he's fine, he's going to have chicken scarpariello for supper.
"Chicken scarpariello," I say. "When did you learn to cook that?"
"I didn't cook it," he says. "Your mother did. You know, that chicken with sausage and peppers that she made that the kids liked so much."
I wonder whether my father is seeing ghosts. Whether his unexpressed grief is causing him to hallucinate.
"Mom?" I ask.
He hears the horror in my voice. Laughs. Tells me it's the food my mother cooked for him before she died.
I try to imagine what it's like for your wife to die; what it's like to eat the food she's cooked for you before she dies. It must be like inhaling the air trapped inside a balloon she's blown up and left behind.
Then I remember how, a couple of days after that, I call my father again, invite him to dinner again, how he says no again. I wonder whether my father is again eating what I've started calling my mother's death food.
But no. A neighbor, Milly the widow from down the block, my mother's old friend, has come to visit him, and she's brought over a casserole for them to share.
"Beware of widows bearing casseroles," I say, and he laughs. I already know he'll marry Milly, and that's fine with me. He'll have someone to take care of him, and I won't have to worry.
I want to write about all these things but I keep making trips to the kitchen to check the biga, the consistency of the dough (/ have to keep checking the dough or I'll fuck the whole thing up if the dough rises too much, I tell myself for the thirtieth or fortieth time), to add the flour, yeast, figs, and nuts to the biga, to knead the bread and set it to rise, to heat the oven.
By now I realize that today it will be impossible to write about the trip to the cemetery, about my mother's death food, about Milly's widow casserole, and I really don't want to write about the cemetery anyway. I want to write about how my father and I have learned to get along. I've started out in the wrong place. But I have to write. I must keep my appointment with myself. I can't sabotage my writing. I must provide a good model for my students. I can't use my craziness about food to get in the way of my work because my craziness about food is supposed to help my work, not harm it.
So, I decide to write about how I'm making the fig nut bread on the day I want to write about going to the cemetery, about my mother's death food, about Milly's widow casserole. I tell myself that showing the process of writing the piece in the piece is a good thing. I tell myself I'm postmodern. I tell myself I'm full of shit.
By now, my hands are sticky; my keyboard is sticky; my desk has a little film of flour on it; my bread dough— which sits next to my computer so I can keep an eye on it while I write— keeps distracting me. And my brand-new cookbook has a grease stain trailing down the picture of the completed bread, which makes me sad because I've been doing two things at once (violating this week's primary personal development goal, to focus on one thing at a time), because I've been moving too fast (violating another personal development goal, to savor the moment and move slowly through life). But, I tell myself, the grease stain isn't such a bad thing. Because in years to come, it will remind me that there has been this bread, that there has been this day, and perhaps I will even remember that on the day that I baked this bread I also wrote these words.
I have asked my father if he needs any help, if I can do his shopping, bring over some food. But this resolutely independent father of mine always says no, he's managing fine, and he enjoys shopping and cooking.
Each week, my father goes to the senior citizens' center in his town and helps cook meals for the "seniors," most of whom are twenty years younger than he is. He has become known as the Spaghetti Man because no one else who works down there, he tells me, knows how to cook pasta al dente, the way it should be cooked. He knows his way around a kitchen, a big kitchen. And he's not afraid to experiment. "I throw in a little of this, a little of that," he says, "and voila, we have a meal."
My father still shovels his own driveway, cleans his own house, fixes his own car, repairs his own appliances. Last year, he fell off a ladder when he was fixing the roof, lost consciousness, wound up in the hospital, pooh-poohed the whole experience, and was back climbing ladders again as soon as he returned home.
"You gotta present a moving target," he tells me when I ask him why he doesn't hire someone to help him. He believes that by keeping busy, he will continue to elude death.
Though he won't accept my help, I still feel guilty about my father having to cook for himself, so I show up at his house with plastic containers filled with food cooked especially for him and Milly. I cook without too much salt, without any saturated fat. He has a bad heart condition, and we're very grateful that he's lived this long. Still, he's a stubborn old bastard, refuses to change his diet, says that if he's lived this long eating anything he wants, it's stupid to change now.
"I should have died in the war, should have died in a fire, should have died from my first heart attack— they pronounced me dead, you know," he says, when I try to persuade him to watch his diet, "but I didn't. Don't worry about me. Only the good die young."
That he's not young anymore does not seem to cross my father's mind. He lives his life as if it's charmed. For what he says isn't exaggeration. Although he is not the kind of man who boasts of his past, who tells war stories, I know that he escaped death many times in the Pacific, that he watched his friends die, that he watched ships go down a few hundred yards from his ship. When he was a fireman, he eluded death by chance many times. But the closest he came to dying was when I was a teenager and he was a fire chief and men from his company were fighting a fire in a bowling alley in a nearby town.
The chief in charge of the fire ordered men from my father's company to go down an alley, break open a side door and direct water inside, an order, my father says, he never would have given.
There was no sign that this fire would be lethal— when they arrived on the scene the firemen saw only a few puffs of smoke, nothing more. Still, my father's instincts told him this was going to be a bad one. And he was right.
My father followed orders, went down the alley, stopped for a moment and turned to see what was going on behind him, to see where the rest of his men were. He saw a civilian, an elected official, far too near the alleyway, and he yelled at this man to move back, to get out of the way.
As soon as his men broke down the door, there was a tremendous explosion; the roof blew into the air; the walls blew out and collapsed. One wall came down just two feet from my father, crushing five of his men, the men he had been with until he turned away from them for what couldn't have been more than fifteen, twenty seconds. That pause saved his life. But left him grieving for a very long time.
I tell my father about Whole Foods, the great new market that has just opened. How it's spacious, with high ceilings and tile floors, and food so beautifully arranged that shopping becomes an aesthetic experience. How it's right on the Hudson River. How it sells prepared food: wonderful soups like Harvest Vegetable, beef barley, roasted tomato; roasted chickens; barbecued spareribs; grilled vege- tables; sauteed chicken breasts; the works. And great bread. How you can buy your lunch there and eat it at a table overlooking the water.
My father agrees to meet me. Tells me he'll bring along his shopping list. We haven't been together alone in a while, although I see him every week with his wife, or with my sons and my daughters-in- law.
I suggest we meet, shop, then have lunch. I have vowed that I will protect him from my shopping habits. I will let him choose anything he wants without making a comment or suggesting that he choose something else, and I will not choose something else for him.
Still, I plan to show him all the prepared foods. I hope that if he sees what's available, he'll buy something already cooked and spare himself some wo
rk. He's looking very tired lately from doing so much of the household work. But he doesn't. He tells me he likes trying to replicate the foods his mother used to cook.
We enjoy our times alone together, talking about his past, about my mother, my sister, my grandparents. Until now, I have been reluctant to hear his stories. But lately I've realized that he won't be alive forever, and I want to know whatever he can tell me about his life, about the life of my grandparents, before he dies. I want to understand how my life continues theirs.
So we establish a ritual of having lunch together and revisiting the past. How two people who spent most of their lives fighting with each other have finally become friends is one of the great miracles of my life. And as we eat, my father tells me stories, and my father's stories of our family's past break the logjam in my feelings about him.
Recently, I have told him how, when I was a child, he terrified me, have told him how angry I am at how he treated me.
"I never meant to hurt you," he says.
"But how could I know that?" I ask. "I was just a child."
"I'm sorry," he says.
My father fiddles with what's left of his meal. "I'm learning to express my inner feelings," he says. "We're the only ones left now.
We have to learn how to get along."To end with this, I think, that we have learned to get along.
Today, he tells me how Milly's been forgetting things, how worried he is about her because she won't take her pills and she sleeps all the time.
"I have to wake her up every day," he says, shaking his head.
"What time does she get up if you don't wake her?" I ask.
"Oh, about nine o'clock," he says, as if this is a very bad thing.
I remember my father pulling the covers off me and my sister on weekends, yelling "Up and at 'em! The early bird gets the worm!"
"Nine o'clock," I say, "is a perfectly respectable hour for Milly to get up. She's worked hard all her life; she's entitled to rest whenever she wants to."
Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family Page 22
