Crazy in the Kitchen

by Louise DeSalvo

  When the family gathers for Thanksgiving this year, our grandkids, Julia and Steven, are watching the parade on TV. I think this will keep them occupied as I make our chestnut soup, finish our home-baked breads. After a few minutes, I check on them to see how they are.

  "Nana," Steven says, as the twirlers are twirling and the marchers marching, "this is boring. Can we please watch TV Food?" This is our family name for the Food Network. The kids are mesmerized by Martha Stewart cooking turkey. And by Emeril Lagasse.

  "This is so exciting," Steven says, when I check in on them again. "Let's kick it up another notch."

  Another time, I'm taking care of Julia. She's playing dress-up. She puts on a scarf, pretends it's a shawl. Puts on my shoes, takes my pocketbook. Starts walking around.

  "Where are you going?" I ask.

  "To London to visit the Queen," she answers. Then reconsiders. "No," she says, "I won't go there. London is too scary. There are globlins in London. I think I'll go to Williams-Mamoma instead." Williams-Sonoma, my favorite store, not part of the lexicon of the average three-year-old girl, unless she has someone like me for a grandmother.

  When I pick up either of the kids for some special time after school, we always have an activity— riding bikes, walking around the neighborhood, going for a ride, visiting a playground or a museum. And then we go shopping so Steven or Julia can choose a special treat that costs five dollars or less.

  "Would you like to go to a toy store?" I ask Steven the last time we meet.

  "No," he says, "I'd rather go to Whole Foods." He takes his time walking around; checks out the fruits; checks out the prepared foods; eats every sample of cheese; eats every sample of bread. I can tell this is going to take a very long time.

  Finally, he chooses: a quesadilla, and a cheese-and-dill dip. Then Steven asks if we can afford to bring his sister and his parents a treat. He's gotten one; they should have one too.

  "Of course," I say, proud of his generosity.

  We walk through the store again. These choices take him just as long. Finally, Steven decides on a box of organic strawberries for Julia. And a bouquet of flowers and a six-pack of a premium beer for his parents.

  I restrain my laughter. As we check out, he points to the beer. Tells the clerk, "This is for my parents; they like special beers. They drink it when we eat Indian food."

  This past summer, my husband and I are going away for four days. At the other end of our two-hour drive is a kitchen, and we will arrive in time for lunch.

  In the kitchen at home we have beautiful farmer's-market cherry tomatoes, a ball of homemade mozzarella swimming in its own milk, some fresh basil doing nicely on the windowsill, its roots in water. So I think, pizza Margherita, the queen of pizzas.

  I figure that, before we leave, I'll make a pizza dough, real quick, in my Cuisinart, from a great recipe I found in one of Julia Child's cookbooks. It's not authentic, but it's easy to stretch, with a nice crunch. I'll put it in a bowl, stash it on the floor of the car. It'll rise while we're driving. When we're halfway there, we'll stop by the side of the road, I'll jump out, punch it down, re-form it into a ball, cover it again. Let it have a second rise. By the time we arrive, it'll be ready. In no time at all, we'll have pizza. But not just any pizza. My homemade pizza, one of the best we've had, even including those we've eaten in Italy.

  So, we pack the car. A few bags of pasta we've brought home from Italy. Some Sicilian sea salt, gathered by hand. "They have stores there, you know," my husband says. "But they don't have these ingredients there," I reply.

  I stash some of my kitchen equipment, which travels— my favorite skillet, my mezzaluna, my authentic Ligurian mortar and pestle carted home from our most recent trip, my Pugliese cookbook, my panini cookbook.

  "We're going to stop, right, so I can punch down the dough," I say.

  "You're not going to punch down the dough on the side of the road," Ernie says. "What if someone sees you?"

  My husband cares about what people think about him, even what total strangers think about him. Me, I don't give a shit what other people think of me. But my husband thinks that the guy in the car on the Long Island Expressway will see me punch down my dough by the side of the highway and think less of him.

  So I tell my husband that no one will know what I'm doing; no one will care. Frankly, I think it's kind of cool to be using your driving time to let a batch of dough rise. This is the kind of multitasking I approve of.

  I tell him that when he eats the pizza I will make, he will think that it was worth all the trouble. "You're nuts," Ernie says, "but a wonderful kind of nuts."

  On our last trip to Italy, to the South, to find my ancestors' villages, Ernie and I have eaten a lot of splendid pizza topped with the finest and freshest ingredients, cooked in wood-burning ovens. We have eaten pizza every day. Pizza marinara, with tomatoes, garlic, oregano— the original pizza; pizza canzone del mare (song-of-the-sea pizza), with cherry tomatoes, basil, garlic; pizza verdi, pizza with buffalo milk mozzarella, anchovy fillets, fresh parsley, capers, garlic, arugula; pizza alia melanzana (with eggplant); pizza con carciofi (with arti­chokes) and con cipolle (with onions). And, of course, pizza Margherita.

  In a bookstore, I have discovered the cookbook La Pizza: The True Story from Naples. This is my fifth pizza cookbook. But it is definitive, because it relates the origin of pizza, tells how it is cooked in the finest pizzerias in Naples.

  I have read it, underlined it, taken notes from it, especially on the chapter "Pizza Taboos," listing the rules for pizza laid out by the Associazione Vera Pizza Napoletana. Yes, there are rules for making an authentic pizza, and strict ones. You can't use any kind of fat in the dough, including olive oil; you must knead the dough by hand, although you can use a special pizza-kneading device approved by the Association; you can't use a rolling pin to flatten the dough; you can't use a baking tin; you can't use an electric oven— only a wood-fueled, bell-shaped oven.

  The aim is to produce a pizza that will be "supple, perfectly cooked, fragrant and framed by a high, soft border."

  Pizza is taken very seriously in the land of my ancestors. People argue about it. People come to blows about it. You would stand a chance of getting away with disrespecting someone's mother sooner than you would of getting away with disrespecting someone's favorite pizza. I take pizza very seriously too, and when we arrive home, I begin what my family calls my Pizza Period.

  Before this, there have been the Risotto Period; the Tagine Period; the Paella Period; the High-Heat Roasting Period; the Slow Cooker Period; the Stir-fried Period; the Artisan Baker Period; the Homemade Pasta Period; the Lasagna Period; the Creative Salad Period; the Panini Period; the Homemade Yogurt Period, the Homemade Ricotta Period (a very short period, because making ricotta is such a pain in the ass and the result doesn't taste as good as the ricotta from my favorite Italian market); the Homemade Ice Cream and Homemade Waffle Cone Period; the Minestra Period; the Tuscan Period; the Ligurian Period; the Pugliese Period.

  During each of these periods, I have purchased cookbooks, special ingredients, special equipment. I have so much kitchen equipment, so many cookbooks, so many special ingredients that any thief who comes to our house should avoid the jewelry box and head straight for the cupboards.

  I love all my cooking equipment. I talk to my appliances. I praise them for jobs well done. And I don't yell at them if something doesn't go right; I just give them some time off. I don't want to get into a power struggle with my equipment.

  I love my kitchen. It's not a gorgeously decorated, high-end, industrial-stove, giant refrigerator, handmade-tile-and-backsplashes kind of kitchen. It's an ordinary serviceable kitchen, with a small prep area, but it's a cheerful kitchen, and it's right next to my study, so I can run back and forth all day long, from writing to cooking, from cooking to writing. And I do. My kitchen is my refuge. My cooking makes my writing possible.

  When we travel, we look for equipment and ingredients to lug home from wherever we've be
en— an authentic mortar and pestle (from Genoa, very heavy, carried by Ernie); salted capers (from Sicily, bought in Taormina); bottles of tuna (from Liguria, caught in the waters off Camogli); dried wild marjoram (from the area near San Rocco di Camogli in Liguria); dried wild mushrooms (from Varese Ligure); peperoncini and sun-dried tomatoes (from Alberobello, bought from an extraordinarily handsome young man who looks like one of my sons); wild honey and handmade pasta, estate-bottled olive oils and wine, and bottles of aged balsamic vinegar (from Don Alfonso's in Sant'Agata sui Due Golfi on the Sorrento peninsula). And whenever we visit Liguria, we always bring back dried wild herbs— marjoram, basil, and oregano (all from the forest on the Portofino peninsula; gathered and dried by monks).

  Sometimes we return with food you're not supposed to bring into the country: fresh wild fennel, scamorza cheese, an amazing salami made on a farm we visit. With every excellent meal I make using my special ingredients, I drive away the phantom of my mother's kitchen, try to obliterate the want of my ancestors.

  My husband and I don't go out to many restaurants; like many Italians, we prefer to eat at home. But when I order something in a restaurant, on the rare occasions when we go out, I am in an agony of waiting. I do not make good dinner table conversation. I am not a chit-chatter. I might be seated next to a Pulitzer Prize winner, and I don't give a shit about whether the book was hard to write. All I care about is When will the food come? When will the food come? When will the fucking food come?

  I am not good company in a restaurant. I like to have complete control of my food. Which means cooking what I like just the way I like it, and serving it attractively, but certainly not in little piles or towers. At home, there's none of this waiting around for someone to bring you your food.

  Restaurants. I don't understand them, don't understand giving a stranger control over what you eat. If my own mother fucked up my food, why should I trust a stranger?

  But in Italy— first in Tuscany, then in Liguria, all over Sicily, and, most recently, in Puglia and Campania— I have learned to enter restaurants with joyful anticipation; learned to love eating in restaurants; learned to love choosing my food; learned to trust the chef and the staff; learned to trust the pace of the meal; learned to visit kitchens at the invitation of the chef with a feeling akin to the intense love you had for someone when you were in high school. (Though I still hate eating out in the United States.)

  Why? Because in Italy, even in small, unprepossessing places, people care about food. Really care. They get teary eyed over little tomatoes grown close enough to the sea so their flavor intensifies. They caress eggplants the way a mother caresses a baby's bottom. They sniff melons before they buy them, the way an elegant woman chooses the finest perfume. They care about food in a way my mother never cared about food. And they want you to care, too. They want to please you, for they know that food is about pleasure. About appetite, and its satisfaction.

  Once, while we are savoring wine and a small meal in an enoteca in Chiavari in Liguria, we see the owner at a table in the back, cleaning fresh porcini for the next day's service. He's doing this while we'reeating our dinner.

  On the table is a huge wicker basket containing the porcini. He has his tools— a knife for paring away imperfections, a brush for cleaning, some immaculate napkins for wiping off the dirt— lined up beside him. He cleans the porcini where we can see him work, to show the care he takes, to show how it should be done, to show the respect he accords this magnificent fungus, but also to show the respect he accords his patrons.

  For all the time we're there, he scrapes and brushes and cleans and holds each mushroom close to his eyes to examine it. Each takes a long time to clean, and I watch in fascination, learning the meaning of patience and care. As he works, he smiles. His work is satisfying, and he's doing it as if there is nothing more important to do in all this world.

  At La Cucina di Nonna Nina in San Rocco di Camogli in Liguria, for the first time in my life, I eat corzetti, a pasta made with wine, rolled out, cut into circles, then stamped between two pieces of hand-carved wood. At Nonna Nina, one side of the corzetti bears the restaurant's name; the other, the rays of the sun. The indentations and raised surfaces of the pasta introduce subtle differences in the texture of each bite. Tears come to my eyes as I taste. I am happy. I am in the moment.

  The owner's wife notices my pleasure. She introduces herself— Signora Rosalia Dalpian— and she invites me into the kitchen to meet her husband, the chef, Signore Paolo Dalpian. He shows me the corzetti stamp, which has been in his family for generations.

  La Cucina di Nonna Nina specializes in traditional dishes made in the old way from heirloom family recipes. Over the years, my husband and I eat there a score of times. Each time, there is something new to savor; the menu changes with the seasons, and with available ingredients.

  One spring, Signore Dalpian presents a ricotta torte he makes at the beginning of the season when the grass is at its sweetest, which means that the cheese will be at its sweetest. We travel back the following autumn, and there is no ricotta torte: ricotta torte is made only in spring, Signore Dalpian says. So we travel back the following spring to have it again. And yes, it's worth the journey.

  In Recco, in Liguria, we eat at Da 6 Vittorio because we want to savor their famed focaccia col formaggio, made with Crescenza or Invernizzina cheese made nearby. Only certain restaurants can advertise that they make this specialty; in Recco, famous for this focaccia, its production is scrutinized and regulated to make sure the approved restaurants serving it meet stringent standards. It is a huge focaccia, its dough is flaky and extremely thin, its melted cheese tangy and unctuous. The food writer Fred Plotkin calls it "the most addictive food on the planet." It is served in wedges, one huge focaccia shared among several diners. After our meal, we talk to the proprietors, the brothers Gianni and Vittorio Bisso, about how the focaccia is made. Back home, it is something we dream about. And when we return to Liguria, one of our first stops is to this restaurant.

  On our second trip, after our meal, we talk to the brothers for over an hour. They remember us from our last visit; they're glad we've come back. During our conversation, we mention we would like to make our own corzetti. So Gianni gets a map, shows us a village— Varese Ligure— in the mountains, where we can buy a stamp for embossing corzetti. He takes the time to make sure we understand his directions. We travel there, buy two, make corzetti all year long.

  On our most recent trip, when we arrive at Da 6 Vittorio, we feel as if we've come home. After our focaccia, we're taken to see the special ovens; shown a model of the wagon that delivered focaccia through the streets of Recco during the Bisso brothers' grandfather's time; and on a tour through the restaurant's archive to see photos taken during the World War II bombardment of Recco, which nearly obliterated the village. The restaurant was one of the few buildings left standing.

  In Sicily, in Aci Trezza, north of Catania, at a restaurant overlooking lemon groves and the Ionian Sea, I am eating pasta ca Nonna (pasta alia Norma, in Italian)— pasta with sauteed eggplant, tomatoes, basil, and ricotta salata. This is the third time in a week we are dining here, the third time I've had this traditional Sicilian pasta.

  The pasta is homemade; it is in the shape of an elongated tube pierced with a very small hole. I want to learn how it is made; I want to reproduce it back home.

  I summon the courage to ask the owner. He obliges me by giving me his recipe for the dough, and telling me the strands are shaped by wrapping strips of dough around a knitting needle. No special tools are used; just the knitting needle any Sicilian household would have.

  The owner tells me what kind of flour to use. I tell him I doubt I'll be able to find it back home. So he goes into the kitchen and comes out with a packet for me. And tells me if I can't find it, to write him, he'll send it. He wants me to make this at home; he's happy I care enough about this food to want to make it myself. When we leave, we say we'll come back the next time we come to Sicily, and we mean i
t.

  In the Panificio Maccarini in San Rocco in Liguria, I am buying packages of pasta, ones I can't get in the United States— troffiette, corzetti, special small oblongs of lasagna— and, of course, Ligurian olive oil. (In the Milan airport, my husband will complain as he trundles fifteen pounds of pasta and several liters of olive oil, all too precious to be stowed, from one end of the airport to the other. But he's used to it. This is the way we always return home: our bags stuffed with delicacies.)

  The owner of the panificio, Anna Maccarini, notices my excitement. Even though there are many people waiting for her to serve them, she stops and calls someone from the kitchen to help so she can teach me recipes for what I buy. She teaches me to use the lasagna noodles to make a recipe that's not baked: you use a low pan, she says, and you layer the pasta with a tomato sauce (with carrot, celery, and onion, the vegetables removed, macerated, and returned to the sauce). She teaches me her recipe for pesto. I complain about the basil in the United States.

  She asks me what I'll do with the aniseed. I give her my recipe for a bread I make with orange rind, almonds, and ground aniseed, a family favorite. She writes down the ingredients.

  I speak almost no Italian, but from years of living with my grandmother, I can understand everything Anna Maccarini says. Using gestures, helped along by my husband's meager Italian, we exchange a score of recipes before it's time to leave.

  Signora Maccarini comes out from behind the counter. Hugs me. Kisses me. For a moment, though I am in my fifties, I want her to be my mother. I have found a food friend. A woman I return to each time we visit Liguria.

  It is here, in a land that starved my grandparents until they were forced to leave for America, that I truly learn the pleasures of the Italian table.

  Part Four

  COMMUNION

  COURTSHIP (WITH FOOD)