At my local Publix or Whole Foods now, when I feel the rock-hard peaches and pears, or I try to pick up a scent from the unforthcoming melons, when I bring home green beans or zucchini that have little more taste than the water with which they have been abundantly irrigated, not to mention the times that the musty smell of long storage forces me to discard what I have just bought, I think of the fragrance and juicy, sugary flesh of the primizaro’s fruits, of the concentrated flavor of his vegetables, and I wonder why we in America can’t have better-tasting produce. Why aren’t we showing the people who raise our produce how to be better farmers? Not necessarily organic farmers, or more efficient farmers, just plain old cultivators of good food. If our vegetables had taste and cooks were shown what they need to do with them, which is very little, everyone would eat more vegetables. Italians don’t eat as many as they do because a government agency or the press tells them how healthy it is for them. They eat them because they taste so good. It is through irresistibly good taste—never mind “organic” or other fashionable categories—that food makes people happy and healthy.
There was a small open-air market close to the river that I could easily walk to, and it filled most of my needs, but the market I remember most fondly was the one at Campo dei Fiori. Its name, until I first went there, led me to think it was a flower market. It was much too far for me to walk to, but I sometimes had a friend drive me, and when she couldn’t, it was worth my taking a taxi. They were very cheap then, and no tipping was expected.
I have never received better or more desirable instruction about any subject than what I was taught about the Roman way of cooking vegetables at the Campo dei Fiori market. It was there that I became acquainted with mammole, the large, round-faced artichoke essential to two Roman preparations, carciofi alla romana, artichokes Roman style, and carciofi alla giudia, artichokes Jewish style. The woman selling them patiently showed me how to prepare both, and both techniques made themselves at home in my kitchen, eventually landing in my cookbook. For Roman style, the artichokes are trimmed of the tough part of the leaves, but the thick, long, meaty, virile-looking stem is left on. Only its leathery rind is peeled away. The whole artichoke, its stem thrusting upward, is braised in a tall saucepan in very little olive oil and water. “Cover the pan with a moist towel, to hold the moisture in, and put the lid over the towel,” she told me. For carciofi alla giudia, Jewish style, the stem is sliced off, but it is not thrown away, because it is so good. It is reserved for use in a soup or a meat stew after the rind has been stripped from it. The head of the artichoke is here again trimmed of the tough, inedible portion of its leaves (Italians find it mystifying that others will cook something that they won’t be able to eat), and it is fried in two successive batches of hot oil. A drizzle of water causes the second batch of oil to sizzle, and the leaves open, curl, and turn a golden brown. The finished artichoke resembles a chrysanthemum and is deliciously crisp.
Late in the fall, I had picked up a head of chicory to add to my purchases, intending to blanch it and sauté it, but the woman selling it, realizing that I didn’t know what I had, took it from my hands and spread open the head to disclose a plump mass of twisting shoots. “Sono le puntarelle,” she said (“They are the chicory’s shoots”). She cut them away and showed me that when she dropped them into a bowl of cold water they curled up. From her I learned to make what became our favorite salad that winter, puntarelle tossed with salt, vinegar, olive oil, garlic, black pepper, and anchovies. It is so good that I wanted it in one of my books, even though puntarelle rarely appear in a stateside market. I chose Belgian endive as an alternative. It doesn’t curl up in ice water, but that aside, when it is treated to the puntarelle seasoning formula, it provides a reasonably tasty reminder of the original.
In the spring at Campo dei Fiori, I was introduced to what I believe to be the most ravishing of all vegetable dishes, la vignarola. I would even be prepared to omit the qualification “vegetable” as an unnecessary limitation. You must be there at just the one moment in the spring when baby fava beans, small rosebud artichokes, and very small peas, all at the same early stage of development, appear in the market at the identical time. If it should last more than two weeks, it is a lucky year; a month, a prodigy. You also need some cipollotti, young onions, and a small head of romaine lettuce. The onion is sliced and cooked in olive oil until it is very soft. You add the lettuce, the trimmed artichokes, the shelled beans and peas, and cook. The vegetables are so young that it doesn’t take very long. When done, it doesn’t look very presentable. It is a dark, mushy mass that you might think a careless cook had produced. But when you take a mouthful, it is as though spring itself in all its tenderness has been delivered in edible form.
Often after shopping, I would drag my packages over to one of the tables of a café in the Campo, where I would have an espresso or, if it was closer to lunch, a Campari soda. Other women would do the same and I would eavesdrop. They always talked about cooking. It is from such a group that I first heard about coda alla vaccinara, the iconic Roman dish. A tail butcher’s style? What kind of a tail and what was butcher’s style? I asked and they mentioned a restaurant whose specialty it was, which Victor and I promptly visited. Thereafter, I cooked oxtail several times in Rome, with the requisite jowl and celery, but less frequently later in New York, where celery was plentiful, but neither tail nor jowl was an everyday commodity at my butcher. What I most regretted having to give up in New York was abbacchio, milk-fed lamb, the whole lamb weighing just fourteen to fifteen pounds from its tail to its muzzle. The best parts were the tiny offal: the kidneys encased in fat, the sweetbreads, the delicate brains, the heart. Nor can one forget the scottadito, the miniature rib chops, cooked just long enough to “scald the fingers.”
By the New Year, Victor could take me to Campo dei Fiori on any morning I wanted to go. The studio that had brought him to Rome had folded. Once again, Victor had no job, but it neither shocked nor worried him this time. Word spreads fast in the small world of advertising, and soon there were offers from Milan as well as from London and Munich. Munich was out of the question. Most of Victor’s relatives had died in concentration camps. He could not bear to live in Germany. Nor was he willing to return to Milan. London we both loved, but the problem was that he didn’t want to go back to advertising. That was a surprise for me.
“What is the matter with advertising?” I asked.
“It has come to a dead end for me. It makes me think of one of those slow emulsions photographers use to pull up and print the images they have shot, when inexplicably it stops short, and nothing comes up but a blur. If I go back, there will be no definition to my life; it too will be a blur.”
“What are you—we—going to do?”
“I don’t know yet.”
It was the same phrase he had used when we had just come back to Italy.
“What would you like to do?”
“Ideally?”
“Yes, ideally.”
I could guess what was coming.
“I would like to have time to study art, more exactly crafts, and in particular, pottery. I would like to learn Japanese so that I could live in Japan and work in a pottery.”
I wasn’t as startled as one might think. Japanese art had been a passionate interest for him ever since college. I could not prod him toward any direction he wasn’t ready to take. In his irresolution, he was resolute, but I knew he would never allow us to flounder. All I could do was wait.
We felt no pressure to decide anything immediately. We were free from work and, in the short term, from financial pressures. We were living in Rome, one of civilization’s crowning treasures, which we could now leisurely explore. We chose not to budge from Palazzo Ruspoli for a while. In the morning, Victor would drive Giuliano to St. George’s, a private English school on the Via Salaria. We have never spoken anything but Italian at home, and when we thought that we were going to be in Italy indefinitely, we took steps to make sure that Giuliano would become as com
fortable in English as he was in Italian. After dropping off Giuliano, Victor came home to go marketing with me at Campo dei Fiori some mornings, close to the palazzo other times. When it was a mild day, we looked for a place where we could eat outdoors; otherwise we had lunch at home. The rest of the day, guidebooks and maps in hand, we visited Rome. We saw all of baroque Rome that we could find, every church of Borromini’s, every carving of Bernini’s, every painting of Caravaggio’s. And we paid our respects to every other period of its long history, from the pre-Christian Forum, to the ghetto’s medieval quarter, to the triumphant expression of the Renaissance that is the Vatican; from the beautiful art nouveau neighborhoods of the early 1900s to the neoimperial monuments of Mussolini’s time.
Victor’s father telephoned to say he was coming to see us. He came to Rome with a proposal. He and his wife had had a hard-working life, he said. They were longing for retirement to a warm climate, but first they had to sell the business. If Victor would come back and help make it very attractive to a good buyer, once the business was sold Victor would be able to retire as well and pursue his interests wherever they took him.
The apprehensions that possessed me when I had landed in Italy five years earlier had quickly been replaced by a life more complete than any I could have imagined. I had discovered my own country, taking full measure of its gifts. It hardly seemed possible to have to leave it. But my choice was either to continue to stay in Italy or to stay with my husband. I chose my husband. We didn’t go to New York by plane. Victor felt we ought to go by sea, to have more time to adjust to the return to the States.
The hardest part of all for Victor was giving up our apartment. Twice before in his life when we moved—when he had had to leave the villa in the hills above Florence, and then, after Giuliano was born, when we exchanged the Sixty-fifth Street brownstone for an apartment on Central Park West—he felt that what he was leaving behind was part of himself. After the movers had emptied the apartment, before leaving for Naples to board the Raffaello, we climbed up to the altana, where Victor lingered to look once more on Rome, and cry.
Back to the New World
1967-1970
OUR BOOKS AND HOUSEHOLD EFFECTS were crossing the Atlantic, some of them for the fourth time. While waiting for them to arrive, we stayed in the house that Victor’s parents owned in Atlantic Beach, on a sliver of land on Long Island that separates the ocean from an inlet known as Reynolds Channel. The ocean beach and the Atlantic’s surf were a short walk away from the house, which had its own little patch of beach on the channel and a pier from which we could fish. It was a long commute to the city for Victor, but it was the beginning of summer and a pleasant place for Giuliano to be. He had terrific fun fishing from the pier, pulling up flounders, blowfish, and the strange-looking horseshoe crabs, and doing a ten-year-old’s jig of triumph mixed with terror when he landed a thick, fiercely twisting eel.
We would soon be living in midtown Manhattan and we wanted Giuliano to continue his education in a private school not too far from us. He had had three years of grammar school in Italy, the last one in an English school, and we expected that he would be
On the S.S. Raffaello, 1967, the captain’s welcome ball
eligible for admission to the fourth grade. After the first few thorny interviews in a language that he had scarcely begun to use, it became obvious to us, to his examiners, and to Giuliano that it would be to his advantage to step back a year and start his catching up at the third-grade level.
As it turned out, language was the least of his problems. Lunch was the problem. Giuliano had to have it at school, and at first, I prepared the things he was accustomed to eating at home: veal stews, tortelloni with ricotta and parsley, cannellini-bean soups, and other similar dishes that I packed in a thermos container, along with a separate container of fresh fruit. This didn’t last too long. Giuliano said the other children made fun of him for bringing such peculiar food to school. The school had a cafeteria, so we decided he should try it. Unfortunately, that didn’t work either, because there was hardly anything he could eat. He took a chance with the macaroni and cheese because it sounded Italian, but one forkful of it was all he could manage, again to the hilarity of his classmates. I resigned myself to packing discreet-looking sandwiches for him. In his life up to then, it was not what he had been accustomed to thinking of as a meal, but it got him through the lunchtime recess without provoking curiosity and derision.
Neither I nor Victor wanted to give up having lunch at home, a decision that would, three years hence, play a strategic part in the birth of my cooking career. I narrowed my search for an apartment to within a few minutes’ walking distance of West Fifty-seventh Street, forgetting about looking for the space, amenities, and architectural character that we had enjoyed in Italy. What I found, and what we could afford, was a compact but sunny two-bedroom on the tenth floor of a boxy, new, white-brick building on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street, just two blocks away from Victor’s work. When Giuliano came up to look, he raced through from the entrance to the end of the hall where his bedroom was. “É tutto qui?” he asked (“Is that all there is?”).
Victor enrolled in a Japanese-language course at the New School. The pace wasn’t fast enough for him, so he switched to a private tutor who had him prepare for their evening sessions with tapes that he would listen to every morning before going to work. He also took instruction in the tea ceremony ritual at the Urasenke Chanoyu Center, which had opened a branch near the United Nations. I had begun to take Japanese flower arrangement in Rome, intrigued by Victor’s interest in Japanese arts and spurred by my own passion for nature in general, and for flowers in particular. The teacher was Jenny Banti, an Italian woman who had studied at the Ohara School of Ikebana in Japan. She had both a scholarly and an intuitive understanding of Japanese aesthetics and how they derive from the humble and patient observation of nature. Her teachings quickly found a welcome in my heart and mind. Italian regional cooking can claim no relationship to ikebana, nor can the look of our dishes, which hardly ever have any aesthetic objectives. Nevertheless, in ikebana’s fidelity to natural values, in its disciplined improvisations, in its equilibrium of contrasts, there was a parallel, I thought, to my approach to ingredients and to my cooking. In New York, I enrolled in classes in the Ohara method, given by a Japanese master at the Algonquin Hotel.
In the spring of 1969, Victor arranged to have a month off from work and we flew to Tokyo, equipped with lists of everything: names, cities, restaurants, dishes, museums, temples. In Japan, we found beauty quite different in scale and character from that of Italy. Italy’s beauties are often of the monumental kind, in settings encrusted with the country’s multiple pasts. The beauty of Japan was almost self-effacing. It was usually in the immediate foreground: a garden of raked gravel and rocks; a scroll painting unrolled on a table; a tea alcove with an arrangement of flowers; the uncluttered, austere interior of a patrician house; a shop’s wooden façade. It was the beauty of implements, of craftsmanship, of the softly robed women and men wearing their traditional costume. Everything looked ageless, as though it could have been made yesterday or a thousand years before.
I had been told of Japanese women’s deference toward men, but my romantic Italian mentality, formed by tales of the age of chivalry and gallant knights, had refused to take it in. But I soon had to. In restaurants waitresses fawned over Victor, serving him first, and on the occasions when I would approach a door at the same time as a Japanese male, the man would rush past me to spare me the embarrassment of preceding him through it. I can still giggle now, as I did then, over an incident in the elevator of our hotel in Tokyo. When the elevator came to our floor, the top one, Victor and I were the only ones to get in. At the next floor, a big American man entered. At the floor below that, two Japanese women in kimonos, two living miniatures, came in. When the doors opened at the lobby level, the Japanese women stood aside, with a smile and a hint of a bow, waiting for the man to exit first. The
tall American smiled back and waited for the ladies to go. We were stuck in the back. Nobody moved, the doors closed, and the elevator, with all its passengers still in place, rose to the uppermost floor again.
We roamed Tokyo on our own, visiting gardens, galleries, shops, playing pachinko, ducking into small restaurants, going to Kabuki and Noh theater. Looking back, it is hard to believe that we could have been so adventurous. Victor’s rudimentary Japanese helped, of course, even though it didn’t always work in the way he intended. He had become skillful and confident in giving taxi drivers directions. One driver threw him off balance by responding in English. He wanted to show off too. Victor, however, was concentrating so tightly on trying to understand Japanese that he could not make out what the man was saying. I translated into Italian for him, which threw Victor off even more. “When did you learn Japanese?” he asked me.
We were favored during our stay by excellent connections. Victor’s old foreign service friend, Mark, had been consul in Tokyo and had recommended us to a Japanese woman who worked at the embassy. She in turn, when we departed for Kyoto, introduced us to the chief of police there, who became a helpful escort. In Kyoto, Victor also had an introduction to the Urasenke tea ceremony center, and I had an appointment later on in Kobe to meet a living national treasure, Houn Ohara, the head of the ikebana school I attended. I was also to call on a former ikebana classmate who lived in Nara, a Japanese woman whose husband had moved back to Japan to work for Toyota, then in its infancy.
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