Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

by Gabrielle Hamilton

  I have never been able to identify or understand my class. I think we were raised as bourgeoisie but I am not even sure what the term means—shop owners?—and I remember it being spit out in the most derogatory way in the books that I loved most when I was in college. I think it’s considered loathsome. I’m comfortable upstairs and downstairs. I do low-paying manual labor and always have but I’m educated and came to own my own business when I was thirty-four years old. We owned our house growing up but tenuously, so tenuously that we jokingly referred to the bank man who carried my father through a lot of dark valleys as “Uncle” Bill. But we traveled in the summers and drank champagne at holidays. I know which fork to use with which course because I have set and cleared so many tables, not because I have sat at so many. I employ a full-time babysitter in New York but I’m so awkward about it, it’s so new for me, that I get the skillet onto the stovetop and cook the chicken nuggets, and finish all the dinner dishes and clean out the bathtub of tubby toys and soap scum and sweep the floors, so that she can spend the day watching cartoons with the kids. I have even done all of those things one-handed while using my other hand to hold my nursing infant like a football. Cooking dinner, sweeping the floor, and nursing an infant simultaneously? I have done it. A lot. So that when the babysitter arrives, I have erased any inconvenience for the woman because I’m so uncomfortable with the whole scenario. Americans are raised to be uncomfortable with the scenario and we do it all wrong—we confuse the whole thing with class and status and money, and we pay shitty wages, under the table, without insurance or job security and way too frequently with disrespect for the people who do this work. Or we go the opposite direction and act our noblesse oblige, and when we empty our closets we offer our hand-me-downs, and we inquire after the health and well-being of the nanny’s own children, who are usually back in Honduras and being raised by their grandmothers.

  We did not have help in our house growing up. My mother cooked and cleaned and kept the house with five children by herself. There was June, a seamstress, who mended all of our clothes and shortened and lengthened the hems on all the hand-me-downs as they were handed down among the five children. And there was an occasional babysitter I remember, an Italian-American woman, Alice Narducci, and sometimes I was dropped at her house. She ate dinner from a tray in the living room watching The Lawrence Welk Show, and she let me have red gelatin with whipped cream for dessert, both after lunch and after dinner. Two desserts in the same day.

  The new status of the chef as celebrity further confuses me. I used to be “the help,” arriving by the back service elevator, respecting your wishes for well-done beef, dressing on the side, one cube only in your glass of Smirnoff. When I finished cooking and cleaning up, I swept and mopped the floors, put two dish towels under my shoes and skated—printless—to the back door. I called the service elevator and exited your building through the basement warren of hallways with Dumpsters, never having been seen by you or your guests. Now, the Food and Wine Festival organizers arrange my airfare, install me in suites on high floors of exquisite hotels I could never afford on my own income, and you eat my food as I’ve envisioned it and prepared it—as heavily sauced, salted, or rare as I like. Once in South Beach, at the Food and Wine Festival, we were picked up at the hotel and driven to the venue in a black Cadillac Escalade with black tinted windows, the driver in a crisp suit with oiled hair, gold rings, a fresh stick of gum in his mouth. I felt giddy with transgression. We rode a full two feet taller than anyone around us, like military brass. I was giggling, tapping my clogs on the floor, turning around in my seat to share conspiratorial tee-hee’s with my sous chef. At a red light, a ruined guy in a wheelchair with his legs sawed off rolled up to the gleaming black machine and begged at my black expressionless window. I quickly imagined myself as a bystander on the sidewalk, watching the electric window whisper down, a disembodied white hand spit out a few bills, and retreat as the tinted glass rose up and resealed the fortress. Then I imagined the opposite scenario—the one in which the guy in the wheelchair faces the impenetrable, black window of the towering SUV and nothing happens, he is simply ignored, facing his own widened reflection in the high gleam. Paralyzed by the hideousness of both scenarios, I turn to Carlos and say, “Well. I feel really good about myself right now!”

  But in Italy, I can’t understand anyone’s class, let alone my own. The Woman comes for a few hours each day in the mornings and helps with laundry and ironing and cooking and cleaning. She owns her own house; her husband runs his own business. This only describes the summertime, vacation help. But when the Fuortes kids were young and their father was still alive, during the school years in the city, there were two full-time live-ins plus a third part-timer who came in the mornings to keep the family machinery running. There’s something that feels so uncomplicated and without subjugation about it even though I see perfectly well that Alda is the one with the heavy sack of keys. Not one of us seems to prefer sitting down in the parlor being served ice cream. Alda’s tone when speaking to these women sounds, to my ear, totally equal and not for a moment proprietary. There seems to be absolutely no money, at all, and nothing coming in, really, from all the land they own, and most of the house seems to be in serious disrepair. But there is no confusing this: They call Alda “Donna Alda,” they call me “Signora,” they call Michele “Dottore,” and when the sun finally sets over the impluvium, we sleep in the big villa on the big street called Via Tommaso Fuortes. Leone’s full name, to be clear, is Leone Tommaso Fuortes. He is three months old and already has international travel stamped into his passport. He has a passport.

  He will grow up to inherit this house with Marco, or what’s left of it by then. This is so far removed from my own experience that I am made breathless by it.

  Carmeluccia rolls out a small rope of pasta dough and then cuts little pellets about the length and diameter of a squeeze of toothpaste. From these she makes the orecchiette by smudging them with her thumb until they look like little flat coins on the table which she picks up, turns inside out to become concave and sets to dry on a tray. They look exactly like small delicate ears. The “little penises” she makes by pressing a common knitting needle down into the pellet and using it like a rolling pin until the dough has closed into a tube around the needle. Americans would never recognize the shape as a penis, because of our obsession with circumcision, but anyone familiar with the un-maimed ones—in their unaroused state—will see it in an instant. She slides each minchiareddo off the needle and lets it dry, also, on the tray. These two shapes, she explains, are typically made together and served together because they share a cooking time. This starts a loud friendly argument among them all in rapid Italian—with accompanying hand gestures—about correct cooking times.

  I practice my orecchiette.

  I ruin my first dozen but then finally get it and suddenly there I am making perfect little ears right alongside these three Italian women—Rosaria, Carmeluccia, and Alda. With more than forty years between our ages, Alda who owns the house, Carmeluccia who has kept the house, and I who have married into the house, we are all at the kitchen table making orecchiette like we are the same.

  Later, in the evening, I am sitting outside in the front, having an al fresco dinner with Marco at his “restaurant,” a small wooden chair pulled up to the massive granite front stoop of this villa. He’s blond and tan and in nothing but a diaper, trying to manage tortellini with prosciutto and butter with his own fork and he is explicit in wanting no help from me. A battered Volkswagen Rabbit slowly pulls in at the end of the drive and comes to a stop; the driver cranks the hand brake and turns the car off, but leaves the headlights on. He gets out of the car, stands at a respectful distance from the house—not to presume.

  “C’è Donna Alda?” he inquires.

  “Aspetta,” I call to him.

  I get Michele, Michele gets his mother, and suddenly we are unloading gorgeous Gallia melons and red plum tomatoes out of this gentleman’s dusty car. This has
happened a dozen times over the years that I’ve been coming here. A woman at the end of the driveway with giuncata in her bicycle basket. A farmer with a three-wheeled motorized wagon unloading olive oil and eggplant and bringing it into the storage room next to the kitchen. This man, tall and slender, bringing melons and tomatoes. He stands inside the house without touching anything, and will not allow himself to lean against the wall or the door frame even. He is tan.

  Who are all these people who approach the big house and stand at a respectful distance until warmly welcomed into the magnificence by Alda herself, once she squints and adjusts her old eyes and then lights up with immense warmth and recognition? Who are all these people of the local countryside who bring her things and to whom she has Rosaria bring out a couple of beers at eleven a.m. when they are taking a break from chainsawing the dead branches? There was the woman who made burratta and giuncata and she used to bring it to the house, still warm, in the basket of her bicycle until she died a few years ago. This man with the VW and the melons, his name is Cosimino—Alda buys a lot of fertilizer from him for her wheat fields, and he in turn, buys a lot of wheat from her, which he then sells for a profit. Along the way, he brings her nice things from his garden. Antonio brings the olive oil and cuts down the branches. Carmeluccia brings the eggs and her homemade pastas. The transactions and interactions seem so genuine and affectionate—and even without speaking Italian, I can see that these people hold Alda in great esteem with respect and kindness and she, I feel certain of it, regards them equally.

  I study her. I need to know. I need to teach Marco and Leone.

  I can’t tell if I am just learning how to make orecchiette, or if I am learning how to be the woman who keeps the sack of keys, but somehow, July with Alda and the Fuortes family has become the most important and anticipated month of my year.

  18

  WHEN MICHELE WAS FIRST TRYING TO GET WITH ME, HE MADE me some profoundly beautiful ravioli. He got up early on a weekend morning and made his dough. And he went to the gym and did two spinning classes in a row—while his pasta dough rested under a towel at home and became smooth as flesh and tender as lettuce. He then rode his bicycle all the way down to Greenwich Village to get his ricotta from Joe’s Dairy on Sullivan Street and his pancetta from Pino’s across the way and he rode all the way back up to his apartment on the Upper East Side—the whole thing at least an hour’s excursion for just the right ingredients to fill his ravioli. Not to mention three hours of strenuous exercise to coerce his forty-six-year-old body into nail-the-thirty-five-year-old-girl shape.

  They were small and delicate and a beautiful yellow from the yolks in the pasta dough and you could see the herbs and the ricotta through the dough, like a woman behind a shower curtain.

  For the ravioli, he rolled out his pasta with a rolling pin, like his mother uses, not even availing himself of the relative ease and short-cutting of those stainless steel crank jobs that roll dough on graduated thinnesses until you get to nine and you can read the newspaper through the dough. He did that instead by hand on a galley kitchen counter the size of a standard ironing board, between the toaster oven and the dish drying rack. He cut out each round with a paring knife, not even a cookie cutter, and filled each one by placing the ricotta and pancetta mixture in the center of the round, draping another disc of dough on top and then sealing the edges with a damp fingertip. He made dozens this painstaking way. I could imagine him in his lab at the medical college where he both teaches and does research—his technician’s/researcher’s skills totally utilized—where he gets close up on his task—preparing the Western Blot experiment in which he puts a drop of each “ingredient”—antibodies, saline, dry nonfat milk—onto the gel apparatus using a pipette, a ballpoint penlike tool that holds liquids and you click the top to dispense the drop as if you were clicking open your pen to sign important documents.

  He brought Alda into things early on. I met her the first time, when I flew to Italy and met up with Michele on the annual summer month that he spends at home every year. I arrived in Rome, where Michele’s family is from, and Alda, his mother, hugged me in the first three minutes of setting eyes on me. Michele took me on a motorcycle around Rome all night, very fast, and gave me a tour of his city in the dark with the fountains and piazzas and cathedrals and statues high high up of winged horses pulling chariots across the sky made even more luminous and more amazing because of their being lit in golden floods against the orange-scented black night, the oppressive heat of the day diminished, the throngs of summer tourists asleep in their hotels. It was just like that.

  I have loved making my way, imperfectly, around a foreign city on my own. I have loved walking endlessly and getting lost and arriving at the museum or restaurant or store I wanted to go to just as it was closing. Missing the point of my excursion has forced me, on so many occasions, to find the secondary smaller points: the old woman sweeping out her front yard and putting water out for the cats, the baker cleaning out his ovens for the afternoon, the two kids refilling their shoe shine boxes with polish and clean rags—all of these small moments found only by wandering down a side street behind whichever museum I have failed to get to during its operating hours, or on the one day of the year it is closed for some local holiday I’ve never heard of. I have loved the feeling of being pummeled by the intricacies of a city. And also loved the feeling of conquering, in small ways, a city by myself, not speaking the language but eventually finding the right place to get coffee the way I want it, a good dinner, the train station, the bookstore. I have fallen apart on many train station platforms in many foreign cities, alone and unable to figure out why the scheduled train isn’t running. And I have been helped, finally, by some kind person who can see what shit I am in and who has a handful of English words to offer. I have made “friends” with the man at the kiosk who sells the International Herald Tribune and the street maps in his neighborhood, his city. I have even loved, on a certain level, being the tongue-tied patron in the restaurant who so badly wants to eat what the natives all around me are eating over on their tables but being too afraid or unwilling to ask. I have loved being the woman who studies the menu so hard and tries to decode the language digging deep for her four years of advanced Latin, hoping this is a romance language and that that tedious academic effort will pay off as the mother of all languages must have children I recognize, and that will help me discern, linguistically at least, fish from hamburger. I have loved learning a city the hard way.

  But I’ve got nothing bad to say about being introduced to Rome by an extremely capable Roman in a good silk tie who wants, for whatever unclear reasons, nothing less than my heart. So while we rode around Rome at night, eating at tiny perfect trattorie high up in the no-cars cobbled streets of Trastevere—marinated white anchovies, Parmesan omelette, fried cod with zucchini and almonds and buttered bread—and walked across the bridges and made out in public like I would never consent to in New York, his eighty-year-old mother, Alda, stuffed and baked tomatoes, cooked turkey leg with oranges, sent her vegetarian daughter out for the best prosciutto, and laid everything out each day at lunch on the dining room table with linen that had been hand sewn by the convent sisters of the Marcelline order, and with little cruets of her own olive oil from her own olive orchards in Puglia. She squeezed my hands in her arthritic ones with powerful emphasis, while sitting on the terrace trying to stay cool in the late afternoon, for no particular reason, just affection, not in greeting or salutation. And I was hooked; hard and fast. The only words we could say to each other were Ciao and Ciao, coming and going. I didn’t speak any Italian.

  And Michele took care of me in such a way that I didn’t need to.

  I arrived just in time for the family’s trip south, which they make every year, to spend the hot summer months at the house in Puglia. Cousin Chiara and Giuliano and their daughter go down to their house in May, sometimes even earlier for Easter. Sister Gloria did away with the trip altogether a few years ago and just moved there into he
r own house, permanently, winter and summer. Brother Giovanni drives down when he can to help with the opening of the main house and readying it for Alda’s arrival. Sister Manuela waits for her sixteen-year-old son’s finishing of school, before loading up the dog and her stack of books of summer reading and Ando, and maybe one of his teenage friends, before making the eight-hour drive which she usually achieves in something over ten hours as she is a “steady” driver. Brother Carlo, wife Anna, their daughters Agnese and Maria, Anna’s sister, Carlo’s best friend and workmate Paolone and his girlfriend Angela as well as their cat, make the trip in June and stay, more or less, the entire season. Alda takes the train with her youngest son, Giulio, who at forty still lives at home because he is Italian and this is what Italians do if they haven’t married.

  On that first long trip, on the motorcycle—when we left Rome early in the morning—Michele brought me a cold apricot juice and a hot coffee as soon as I woke up. He did the difficult work of driving through that relentless, excruciating hot afternoon on the shimmering asphalt of the autostrada while I sat on the back, lost in the cushion of my helmet, enjoying that exquisite feeling of being totally surrendered, relinquished from all of my responsibilities, even for taking care of my own heartbeat. He drove with care and expertise. He drove fast and assertively. I never felt doubtful. I locked my arms around his chest, leaned into the turns as he had instructed me, and for the rest of the journey spent all those hours on the road gazing out at the rolling hills, and remnants of aqueduct, and skinny tall cypress trees, and centuries old stone barns and let my mind wander further and further away from the kitchen, the hot stove, the chronic necessity of meeting payroll, until I had wandered so far away from my life in New York that I began to think of books, and foreign countries, and I had silvery little fantasies in which I had lived my life as a singer in a small choir and not as a cook in a kitchen.